South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix Inc has chosen the state of Indiana for a cutting-edge facility in the US, the Financial Times reported yesterday.
SK Hynix is considering a possible investment in the US but hasn’t made a final decision yet, the world’s second-largest memorychip maker said in a statement to Reuters.
The company’s new packaging plant in Indiana will specialize in stacking standard DRAM chips to create high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, before integrating them with Nvidia Corp’s graphic processing units (GPUs), the report said, citing sources.
Photo: AFP
SK Hynix currently produces its HBM chips in South Korea. Subsequently, they are shipped to Taiwan, where they are integrated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) into Nvidia’s GPUs, alongside other TSMC-made processors, FT reported.
HBM chips are used to help Nvidia’s accelerators in training artificial intelligence (AI), which has been one of the sector’s most promising markets.
SK Hynix returned to profit last quarter after four consecutive quarters of losses driven by demand for chips used in AI, the company said last week.
The company posted an operating profit of 346 billion won (US$259.4 million) for the October-December period, compared with a loss of 1.9 trillion won in the same period a year earlier, with strong sales of its flagship products DDR5 and HBM3.
Those sales increased more than four and five times each respectively last year, the company said, with strong demand for chips used in mobile applications as well as AI.
SK Hynix said its sales increased 47 percent to 11.3 trillion won in the fourth quarter year-on-year.
However, it still recorded a full-year loss of 9.1 trillion won because of the year-long downturn.
Additional reporting by AFP
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