SAN JOSE, California, March 20 (Reuters) - The same

booming AI demand that has caused the chairman of South Korea's

SK Group to predict shortages of high-bandwidth memory chips

could also cause tight supplies for storage drives, an executive

from the South Korean firm's U.S.-based AI subsidiary Solidigm

told Reuters this week.

Memory chips that sit right next to computing chips are critical

to the servers sold by Nvidia ( NVDA ) and others, and earlier

this week at Nvidia's ( NVDA ) annual developer conference, SK Group

Chairman Chey Tae-won told reporters that shortages of

high-bandwidth memory could last until 2030 because of demand

for AI systems.

But new AI-powered software tools can now make sense of huge

datasets that humans could rarely wring business value from, and

Nvidia ( NVDA ) introduced several new technologies this week aimed at

helping move data more quickly from storage drives to its chips.

"The storage system is going to get pounded," Nvidia ( NVDA ) CEO Jensen

Huang said on Monday during a keynote address at the company's

developer conference.

That is translating into increased demand for solid state

drives, said Greg Matson, senior vice president at Solidigm, the

unit of SK Hynix that sells storage drives to

businesses. Speaking on the sidelines of Nvidia's ( NVDA ) conference

this week, Matson said AI systems coming later this year could

require 35% more storage than previous systems.

"It's going to be tight," Matson said of supplies of storage

memory between now and 2030.

"We'll be coming out with higher-density drives from a silicon

perspective later this year, and even expanding our

manufacturing output as well," Matson said. "But can we keep up?

No, we can't. I could sell twice as much as I am today."