South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc, the world’s second-largest maker of memory chips, yesterday said that some customers have brought forward orders in preparation for new US tariffs on semiconductors.
Speaking at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting, SK Hynix head of global sales and marketing Lee Sang-rak said the “pull-in” effects, along with the reduction in customers’ inventory, led to favorable market conditions.
However, he added that it remains to be seen whether the trend would continue.
Photo: Jung Yeon-je, AFP
The US’ Micron Technology Inc and SanDisk Corp, and China’s Yangtze Memory Technologies Co (長江存儲) have raised their chip prices, partly due to robust demand from the artificial intelligence (AI) market, media reports said.
US President Donald Trump has said he intends to impose tariffs on imports of semiconductors and some other products “in the neighborhood of 25 percent.”
“Fears that the US may impose semiconductor tariffs in April have led to pre-emptive transfers of semiconductor inventory to the United States,” Nomura Holdings Inc said in a report this week.
“It is not yet known if the tariffs will actually be imposed; if this materializes, it could lead to higher prices for set products, which could dampen demand,” it added.
SK Hynix expects “explosive growth” in high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips demand this year, backed by investments in data centers, company CEO Kwak Noh-jung told shareholders.
In January, SK Hynix forecast that sales of its HBM chips would more than double this year.
“Our HBM sales for 2025 have already been sold out, and we plan to finalize sales with customers for the 2026 volume within the first half of this year to further strengthen revenue stability,” Kwak said.
While doubts around a slowdown in spending on AI hardware emerged in January following DeepSeek’s (深度求索) claims that it had developed AI models rivaling Western counterparts at a fraction of cost, Nvidia last month signaled that its AI chip demand was intact.
Kwak saw DeepSeek’s emergence as ultimately beneficial.
“This could likely have a positive impact on medium to long-term demand for AI memory chips. From our perspective, we don’t see DeepSeek slowing down demand for high-performance accelerators or HBM,” Kwak said.
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