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Taiwan emerges as a major South Korean memory export hub due to HBM packaging and Nvidia demand

Friday, March 6, 2026 at 01:31 AM

Taiwan's share of South Korean chip exports surged to 28.6% last year, driven by TSMC's role in packaging South Korean HBM with Nvidia GPUs. This shift highlights a significant pivot in the supply chain as China's share of South Korean exports fell from 50% in 2018 to 32.7% last year, while total memory exports reached US$94.61 billion.

Context

Taiwan has rapidly emerged as a critical hub for South Korean memory exports, driven by the structural demands of the AI supply chain. In a major shift, Taiwan’s share of South Korean chip exports surged from 6% in 2020 to 28.6% last year, totaling $27.08 billion. This growth is primarily fueled by the trilateral collaboration between SK Hynix, TSMC, and Nvidia, where High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is shipped to Taiwan for advanced CoWoS packaging with GPUs before final export to the U.S. and global data centers. This transition highlights a significant decoupling from China, which saw its share of South Korean chip exports fall from 50% in 2018 to 32.7%. As SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics pivot toward AI-centric high-margin products, the reliance on TSMC’s packaging ecosystem has turned Taiwan into a vital intermediary. With the memory market projected to hit record valuations through 2025, this deepening Taiwan-Korea axis represents a fundamental re-engineering of the global semiconductor trade flow.