Samsung's Memory Business Hit With Fresh Patent Lawsuit Over HBM and DDR5

There’s a quiet but escalating legal war unfolding in the semiconductor industry’s most lucrative segment — and this time the battlefield extends far beyond Samsung. Netlist, a California-based memory technology firm, has filed a sweeping new complaint against the Korean giant with both the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) and the Eastern District of Texas federal court, alleging that Samsung’s high-bandwidth memory and DDR5 products infringe on two of its foundational patents. The ripple effects could reach every major player in the AI infrastructure stack, with Google, NVIDIA, Supermicro, and Broadcom all named as co-defendants.

Samsung’s memory division has been riding the AI wave — demand for HBM and advanced DDR5 modules has propelled its profits to new heights. But this latest legal challenge, filed by a company that has already beaten Samsung in court twice, threatens to complicate that trajectory.

At the center of the dispute are two Netlist patents. U.S. Patent No. 12,646,537 covers technology for vertically stacking memory chips and connecting them with through-silicon vias (TSVs) — a cornerstone of HBM design. The second, U.S. Patent No. 12,650,937, protects innovations around the register clock driver (RCD), a critical component in memory modules. Netlist contends that Samsung’s HBM products, along with its DDR5 RDIMMs and MRDIMMs, rely on technology covered by these patents without authorization.

The scope of the complaint is unusually broad. Rather than targeting Samsung alone, Netlist has also named the companies whose products incorporate the allegedly infringing memory. Google’s Tensor Processing Units — the custom AI accelerators that power its cloud and internal workloads — are on the list. So are NVIDIA’s Blackwell and Rubin GPU architectures, as well as server hardware from Supermicro. Broadcom, a key player in AI networking and custom silicon, rounds out the defendant roster.

Netlist is asking the ITC to issue import exclusion orders and cease-and-desist directives, which would bar the accused products from entering and being sold in the United States. While such orders are not granted lightly, the possibility alone introduces significant uncertainty into the AI hardware supply chain at a moment when every major cloud provider and enterprise is racing to secure compute capacity.

IT-NEWS has learned that this is not the first time the two companies have clashed. Samsung entered into a patent licensing agreement with Netlist in 2015, but Netlist alleges that Samsung breached the deal in 2020. Since then, Texas federal juries have sided with Netlist twice, awarding damages of $303 million and $118 million — roughly 20.57 billion yuan and 8.01 billion yuan respectively at current exchange rates, IT-NEWS notes.

Netlist CEO C.K. Hong framed the action as part of a broader campaign. “Netlist continues to drive breakthrough innovation in AI memory,” Hong said. “This enforcement action is a key step in our intensified effort to protect next-generation server memory module and HBM technologies from unauthorized commercial use.”

For Samsung, which is already navigating a competitive landscape where SK hynix has taken an early lead in HBM supply for NVIDIA’s latest GPUs, the lawsuit adds legal headaches to an already pressure-filled market position. For the broader industry, it’s a reminder that the intellectual property foundations of the AI boom are still very much in flux — and the courts may have as much to say about the supply of next-generation memory as the fabs do.