J.P. Morgan Memory Market Update: SK hynix and SanDisk HBF Partnership and SEMICON Korea 2026 Takeaways
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J.P. Morgan's latest memory market update focuses on the newly announced global standardization partnership between SK hynix and SanDisk regarding High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), alongside key takeaways from SEMICON Korea 2026. The firm believes HBF offers distinct advantages in scalability and energy efficiency for AI inference applications, positioning it to coexist with HBM rather than replace it, with demand expected to initiate around 2030. Academic experts have proposed two primary HBF architectures: a hybrid GDDR-HBF multi-GPU setup and an HBF-GPU-HBM configuration optimized for managing long-context KV-cache. HBF demonstrates clear throughput advantages over HBM as large language model parameter scales expand. While the total addressable market for HBF remains difficult to predict and is still in the proof-of-concept stage, production faces technical hurdles involving multiple TSV and stacking processes. Given the rigorous requirements for inference-grade NAND, HBF costs could reach 3-4 times that of standard SSD NAND, pricing at approximately 10 cents per gigabyte or higher in the first quarter of 2026. The firm maintains its stance on a longer and stronger memory upcycle. Seven major memory companies have seen their collective share prices surge 70% year-to-date in 2026, reaching a combined market capitalization of $2.2 trillion. J.P. Morgan asserts that the next phase of growth within this sustained upcycle will be driven by NAND technologies, with HBF potentially extending supply-demand tightness.