About
When the AI boom suddenly needed memory chips that could feed data to GPUs faster than ever, one company was ready: SK Hynix. The South Korean firm began in 1983 as Hyundai Electronics, changed hands to the SK Group in 2012, and is now the world's #2 memory chip maker — and the dominant supplier of HBM (high bandwidth memory), the advanced chips stacked inside Nvidia's AI accelerators. The HBM story explains the company's leap: each HBM module stacks up to a dozen DRAM dies with through-silicon vias, an extraordinarily hard manufacturing feat that only SK Hynix and a handful of rivals can do at volume. Its HBM3E products are the performance bottleneck-breakers for AI training, and the company has sold out its HBM capacity years in advance. Based in Icheon with about 31,000 employees, SK Hynix also produces mainstream DRAM, NAND flash, and SSD products, with annual revenue around ₩33 trillion. Its U.S. investment — a $3.9 billion advanced packaging plant in Indiana — reflects a new strategy: putting its most valuable manufacturing close to its most important customers.
Also known as: SK Hynix
