South Korea is home to the two biggest memory chipmakers in the world (Samsung and SK Hynix), and they are competing to supply chips to NVIDIA, the latest having an insatiable appetite for more and more chips. These two Korean companies are in a race to develop a more advanced and more profitable version of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. During the memory chip boom from 2013-2015, inventories didn’t increase for about a year and a half. In the 2016-2017 cycle, inventory declines lasted nearly a year. A report from South Korea’s central bank expects the latest surge in chip demand to continue at least until the first half of next year. This is because the “artificial intelligence boom” is driving up demand similarly to how cloud servers caused an expansion in 2016, and now mostly forgotten crypto-mining fever. South Korea will release its latest export data on June 1.