South Korean memory chipmaker SK Hynix is to speed up the opening of a new factory by three months and will begin operating another new plant in February, an executive told Reuters, amid surging memory prices spurred by the massive build-out of AI data centres.
Shortages in memory chips have caused large price increases in consumer devices such as phones and PCs, and have also become one of several bottlenecks for the construction of data centres to power AI tools.
Memory shortage
Sungsoo Ryu, chief executive of SK Hynix America, told the news service it planned to open the first factory in a new chip facility in Yongin, 25 miles south of Seoul, three months early in February 2027 to help meet chip demand.
The company also plans to begin deploying silicon wafers next month to a new fabrication plant called M15X in Cheongju, South Korea, to produce high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that are widely used to build AI processing systems, Ryu said.
The Yongin plant is part of the company’s 600 trillion won ($407bn, £303bn) investment in a “Semiconductor Cluster” planned to house four fabs.
Analysts say the first Yongin fab could deliver comparable capacity to SK Hynix’s existing complex in Incheon that contains several factories.
‘Humongous demand’
Ryu said he has not seen any slowdown in memory demand.
“We are seeing a lot of tremendous and humongous demand,” he said.
Prices for some products increased more than 300 percent in December over a year earlier, due to memory chip shortages, according to TrendForce figures.
