The country's leading chipmakers, Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, are set to face off against each other to corner the market for sixth-generation high bandwidth memory(HBM), or HBM4.

The two competitors' priority to secure market dominance in HBM4 was evident Thursday as both companies held a conference call to announce their fourth-quarter earnings.

HBM4 is an advanced type of memory designed to deliver significantly higher data transfer speeds and performance, and is used in artificial intelligence(AI) accelerators, supercomputers, and high-performance computing.

SK hynix, which began the conference call an hour earlier, said it aims to take an overwhelming market share in the HBM4 sector, as it did for the fourth-generation HBM3 and fifth-generation HBM3E products, with final production soon to launch.

On Wednesday, the company said it posted a record annual operating profit of 47-point-two trillion won, or around 33 billion U.S. dollars, in 2025 amid the AI boom.

Samsung, which until now has minimized talk of HBM due to weak performance, said it is already in the process of HBM4 production, and that mass production shipments are expected starting February.

The company said it has completed receiving full purchase orders and anticipates seeing HBM sales to more than triple this year compared to 2025.