Shares of SK Hynix rose more than 9 percent on Thursday as the company began volume production of its latest generation of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that can meet the huge demand for artificial intelligence (AI) faster.

As the world's second-largest memory chip maker, SK Hynix's shares outpaced bigger rival Samsung Electronics, which also rose 4 percent on Micron's positive forecast for AI demand.

SK Hynix said in a statement that its latest generation of HBM devices, dubbed HBM3E, has a 12-layer structure, which is a 50 percent increase in capacity compared to earlier 8-layer chips. SK Hynix, a major HBM chip supplier to NVIDIA, plans to deliver the latest devices to undisclosed customers by the end of the year.

Competition is growing for HBM chips, which help process massive amounts of data to train AI technology and are critical to NVIDIA's graphics processing units.

Samsung Electronics announced in July that it plans to deliver its production-ready HBM3E 12-layer units to customers in the second half of the year. Micron, for its part, announced earlier this month that it has shipped production-ready HBM3E 12-layer modules to key industry partners for qualification.