SK hynix has approved a combined 54 trillion won, roughly $39 billion, for two new fabrication plants to feed AI memory demand. The board gave the go-ahead on August 7 for the Y2 fab at its Yongin Semiconductor Cluster and the M17 NAND fab in Cheongju.
The Yongin Y2 project gets 35.2 trillion won and is the second of four fabs planned for the cluster. The Cheongju M17 NAND fab receives 19.1 trillion won. Together they expand capacity on both halves of the memory business AI infrastructure depends on: DRAM for high-bandwidth memory and NAND flash for the enterprise SSDs stacking up behind AI inference.
The approval follows a period of strong financial performance and signals that the memory maker sees demand holding well beyond the current boom. The announcement came days after Samsung unveiled its own 400-layer NAND and vertical HBM plans, underscoring how aggressively Korean chipmakers are competing to lock in supply.
SK hynix is a leading supplier of HBM, the specialized memory that powers accelerators from NVIDIA and others, and the company has been the primary source for several generations of the chips. The new fabs give it a mid-to-long-term production base for both memory types.
Construction timelines and production start dates were not detailed in the announcement. The company says the investment is aimed at securing capacity to respond to continuously growing demand in the AI era.
