The Zhitong Finance App learned that South Korean memory chip giant SK Hynix (SHKY.US) held a groundbreaking ceremony for its advanced memory chip packaging factory in Indiana, USA on Thursday. The plant, which has invested more than 4 billion US dollars, will become SK Hynix's first high-bandwidth memory (HBM) advanced packaging base in the US, and is also one of the major projects in the US to promote the localization of key semiconductor supply chains.
As investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure continues to grow, HBM has become an essential core component of the most advanced AI acceleration systems from companies such as NVDA.US (NVDA.US). SK Hynix plans to further expand HBM production capacity through the Indiana project and strengthen its layout in the US AI chip supply chain.
SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung said at the groundbreaking ceremony that the factory clean room is expected to be put into use by October 2028, and large-scale production of the next generation of HBM products is scheduled to begin in the second half of 2029. After full production, the project will become an important HBM production hub for SK Hynix in the US and is expected to directly employ around 1,000 employees.
The company said that wafers produced in Korea will be shipped to Indiana in the future, where advanced packaging and testing are completed before being supplied to US customers. This means that the plant is not directly responsible for front-end wafer manufacturing, but rather undertakes the increasingly critical back-end advanced packaging and testing process in the HBM production process.
High-bandwidth memory has become one of the most critical semiconductor products in the current global AI hardware investment boom.
As the scale of AI models continues to expand, GPUs and AI accelerators need to process increasingly large amounts of data, making it difficult for traditional memory to meet data transmission speed and bandwidth requirements. By stacking multi-layer DRAM chips, HBM can significantly increase data transmission bandwidth, and is therefore an important part of Nvidia's most advanced AI acceleration system.
The surge in demand for AI servers is also driving SK Hynix's rapid growth. Currently, the company has become the second-largest company by market capitalization in Korea, after Samsung Electronics. Samsung is also benefiting from the rapid growth in demand for HBM and other memory chips.
SK Hynix's Indiana project was supported by the US Chip and Science Act. According to the relevant plan, the company can receive up to US$458 million in direct subsidies and up to US$500 million in loans, bringing the total amount of potential government financial support to US$958 million.
The Chip and Science Act was signed into law in 2022. One of the main goals is to reduce America's dependence on overseas semiconductor production and promote the return of chip manufacturing, advanced packaging, and R&D capabilities to the US.
Kwak said the factory will help strengthen the AI chip supply chain in the US. SK Hynix will continue to expand investment and cooperation in the US in the future, hoping to become an important partner for the development of the AI industry in the US.
Compared to simply increasing chip manufacturing capacity, another important aspect of SK Hynix's current investment is advanced packaging.
As traditional manufacturing processes become more and more difficult to miniaturize, integrating multiple different chips into one package through advanced packaging, or even stacking them vertically, has become an important technical path for improving the performance of AI chips.
And advanced packaging has long been one of the relatively weak links in the US semiconductor supply chain.
SK Hynix chose to build an HBM packaging base in the US, which means producing wafers from South Korea and then shipping them to the US to complete packaging and testing, which will further shift some of the key AI chip supply chain to the mainland of the US. The company expects that the project will eventually create about 7,000 direct and indirect jobs through construction, operation, and related upstream and downstream industries.
The company is currently evaluating more than 100 potential suppliers of materials, components and semiconductor equipment. If some of these companies invest locally around new plants, it is expected that they will further form a more complete semiconductor industry cluster.
SK Hynix also signed a cooperation agreement with nearby Purdue University. The two sides will develop R&D cooperation in the fields of HBM, system integration, and advanced packaging technology.
The company also plans to build an advanced packaging R&D testing platform near the production line to combine large-scale production with next-generation semiconductor technology research and development. Furthermore, SK Group, the parent company of SK Hynix, said it will provide new employment and career development opportunities for US veterans who have served in the US military in South Korea.