Samsung Electronics has been confirmed to supply high-performance solid state drives (SSDs) for Nvidia’s AI supercomputer DGX Spark, the world’s largest AI semiconductor company.

According to industry sources on Oct. 27, Cho Sang-yeon, Samsung Electronics’ vice president of North America, recently revealed this information through his social media account. Cho said, “Exciting to see NVIDIA’s DGX Spark delivered to SpaceX and Elon Musk --- an impressive step forward for AI computing.” He further stated, “I’m proud that Samsung Semiconductor could support this system with our PM9E1 SSD, a specialized high-performance storage solution designed for DGX Spark.”

The PM9E1 is Samsung Electronics’ industry-leading PC SSD in terms of performance and capacity, with sequential read and write speeds of up to 14.5 gigabytes (GB) per second. It supports a maximum capacity of 4 terabytes (TB) and incorporates 8th generation V-NAND and a 5-nanometer controller, significantly improving power efficiency and stability compared to existing products.

DGX Spark is a desktop AI supercomputer for researchers, developers, and creators, boasting petaflop-class performance capable of performing 1,000 trillion operations per second. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, was the first to receive the DGX Spark. Nvidia stated, “We delivered the product to Elon Musk during SpaceX’s 11th test flight of Starship.”

Samsung Electronics has reportedly begun discussions with Nvidia about supplying HBM3E, a high bandwidth memory (HBM) product, and is also close to supplying the next generation HBM4. With the revelation of high-performance SSD supply to Nvidia, there are predictions that the scale of collaboration between the two companies could expand. An industry insider explained, “The rapidly increasing demand for AI-oriented semiconductors is equally applicable to NAND,” adding, “High-performance, low-power semiconductors for AI are becoming increasingly important.”