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SK hynix Inc.
SK하이닉스 주식회사
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| Formerly | Hyundai Electronics (1983–2001) Hynix Semiconductor (2001–2012)[1] |
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| Type | Public company[2] |
| Traded as | KRX: 000660 Nasdaq: SKHY (American depositary shares)[2] |
| Founded | February 1983, as Hyundai Electronics[1] |
| Headquarters | Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea[3] |
| Industry | Semiconductors[3] |
| Products | DRAM NAND flash memory High Bandwidth Memory Solid-state drives[3] |
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| Headquarters |
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The Icheon campus in Gyeonggi Province — the company's original 1983 site and its headquarters
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| Official links |
| Homepage | Newsroom | Products & Solutions | YouTube | Instagram | LinkedIn[9] |
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World's 10 largest semiconductor companies
by 2025 revenue · Gartner, January 2026
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SK hynix Inc.[note 1] (SK하이닉스 주식회사) is a South Korean semiconductor company that makes computer memory. It is part of SK Group, one of the country's largest business groups, and its head office is in Icheon, south-east of Seoul.[3][2]
The company makes three main kinds of memory. DRAM is the working memory a computer uses while it is running. NAND flash memory stores data permanently, so files survive when the power goes off. High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM, is DRAM built in stacked layers rather than laid out flat; it moves data far faster, which is what artificial intelligence (AI) systems need. Three companies — SK hynix, Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology — supply almost all of the world's memory between them.[3][2]
The name is written SK hynix, with a lowercase h. [note 2][3][2] News outlets often write "SK Hynix" with a capital H, but that is their house style, not the company's. The name hynix came from Hyundai Electronics (Hynics → hynix). The company left Hyundai more than twenty years ago, but it still uses the name that came from there.
SK hynix was founded in February 1983 as Hyundai Electronics. In 1999 it absorbed its domestic rival LG Semicon in a merger arranged by the government, renamed itself Hynix Semiconductor in 2001, and then spent most of a decade under the control of its creditor banks, after the debt from that merger nearly destroyed it.[1][10] SK Telecom bought a controlling stake in February 2012, and the company took its present name a month later.[1][11]
The company built the first HBM chip in 2013 and has been first to market with every generation since.[1][12] That early lead became extremely valuable once the AI boom began in 2023. In 2025 SK hynix reported revenue of ₩97.15 trillion and an operating profit of ₩47.21 trillion. That made it the most profitable listed company in South Korea for the year, and marked the first time it had out-earned Samsung Electronics.[6][13] On 10 July 2026 it also listed shares on the Nasdaq in the United States, raising US$26.5 billion.[2]
Hyundai Electronics was founded in February 1983 as the semiconductor arm of the Hyundai Group; the company's own later filings give the founding name as Hyundai Electronics Industries.[1][14] Construction of the Icheon plant began in October of the same year. A pilot line produced its first chips in December 1984, and 64K DRAM went into mass production in May 1985.[1]
After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the Korean government pushed the country's big business groups into a round of forced mergers known as the "Big Deal", under which Hyundai and LG were to combine their chip businesses.[15] The final agreement was signed on 20 May 1999: Hyundai acquired 59% of LG Semicon — 91,223,594 shares — for ₩2.56 trillion, payable over the following three years.[14] Hyundai took control in July 1999, and the two companies were legally merged that October.[1]
The purchase brought in the Cheongju plants the company still operates. But it was funded with borrowed money, and memory prices collapsed soon afterwards. The company renamed itself Hynix Semiconductor in March 2001 and completed its separation from the Hyundai Group that August, selling off its mobile phone, network equipment and flat-panel display businesses along the way.[1]
Merger talks with Micron Technology opened in December 2001 and reached a tentative agreement in April 2002, but the Hynix board rejected the terms the following month as too low.[10] With no buyer, the creditor banks approved a rescue on 30 December 2002: they swapped ₩1.9 trillion of debt for equity, wrote down the existing shares at a ratio of 21 to 1, and extended the repayment schedule on a further ₩3 trillion. The banks emerged owning roughly 86% of a company that still carried ₩8.6 trillion of debt.[16][10]
Other countries hit back. The United States, the European Union and Japan all imposed tariffs on Hynix chips, arguing the bailout amounted to a disguised government subsidy. A World Trade Organization panel ruled against Japan's measures in 2007, and the American duties were lifted in 2008.[1][10] Hynix sold its non-memory division in October 2004 — it became MagnaChip — and emerged from creditor administration ahead of schedule in July 2005, though the banks remained its largest shareholders for another seven years.[1]
SK Telecom agreed in November 2011 to buy a controlling stake, and closed the deal on 14 February 2012, paying ₩3.37 trillion for 21.05% of the shares at ₩23,099 each. It was the largest acquisition in SK Telecom's history.[11] Chey Tae-won, chairman of SK Group, took the chair of the semiconductor company, and in March 2012 it was renamed SK hynix.[1]
The holding structure changed once more in November 2021, when SK Telecom spun off its non-telecom investments into a new company, SK Square, which inherited the SK hynix stake.[17]
SK hynix developed the first HBM chip in 2013 and brought it to market with AMD the following year. At the time, most of the industry saw stacked memory as a niche product for graphics cards.[1][18] It has held that lead ever since. It was first to mass-produce HBM2E in 2020, first to develop HBM3 in 2021, and first to supply HBM3 to NVIDIA in 2022. In 2024 it shipped both the 8-layer and 12-layer versions of HBM3E ahead of everyone else.[19][20][21]
The company bought its way to scale in NAND at the same time. In October 2020 it agreed to acquire Intel's NAND and solid-state drive business for a headline US$9 billion, in two stages. The first, in December 2021, brought over the drive business and Intel's fab in Dalian, China, which was rebranded Solidigm. The second, in March 2025, transferred Intel's NAND designs and research staff.[22][23][24] SK hynix also holds a stake in the Japanese memory maker Kioxia, having committed ¥395 billion in 2017 to the investor group that bought Toshiba's memory unit.[25]
The AI build-out that began in 2023 turned HBM into the centre of the business. SK hynix completed development of HBM4 in September 2025, unveiled a 16-layer, 48GB version at CES in January 2026, and shipped the first HBM4E samples in June 2026.[12][26][27] On 29 October 2025 the company announced that customers had already bought its entire planned DRAM and NAND output for the whole of the following year.[28]
DRAM is the larger half of the business. Chipmakers compete by shrinking the circuit patterns printed on each wafer, since smaller patterns mean faster, cheaper and more efficient chips; each shrink is known as a process node. SK hynix reached the 1a nm node in July 2021, 1b nm in 2023 and 1c nm in August 2024. In 2025 it also became the first company anywhere to put a High-NA EUV scanner — the most advanced and expensive chipmaking machine built — into commercial production, at its M16 fab in Icheon.[29][30][31]
The product range covers most uses of DRAM. DDR5 modules go into servers, GDDR7 into graphics cards, and the low-power LPDDR family into phones and, increasingly, into AI systems.[32][33] A newer category sits between them: SOCAMM2, a 192GB low-power server module built for NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform, entered mass production in April 2026.[34]
HBM is built by stacking DRAM dies on top of one another and connecting them with tiny vertical wires that run straight through the silicon. It is much harder to manufacture than flat memory, but it moves data at far higher rates, which is precisely what AI accelerators need. Since HBM2E, SK hynix has reached volume production ahead of its rivals every time. The company credits its MR-MUF packaging method, which fills the gaps between stacked dies in a single step rather than one layer at a time.[18][21]
The company's own record of the line runs as follows.[1][12][27]
| Generation | Milestone | Date |
|---|---|---|
| HBM | First stacked HBM developed | 2013 |
| HBM2E | Mass production | July 2020 |
| HBM3 | Development; first supply to NVIDIA | October 2021; June 2022 |
| HBM3E (8-layer) | Volume production | March 2024 |
| HBM3E (12-layer) | Volume production | September 2024 |
| HBM4 | Development completed, 2,048 I/O | September 2025 |
| HBM4E | Samples shipped | June 2026 |
Every HBM stack sits on a base die that controls it. In April 2024 SK hynix agreed that TSMC would manufacture the base die for HBM4 — an unusual arrangement, since each memory maker had until then produced its own.[35]
The NAND business combines SK hynix's own memory chips with Solidigm's enterprise solid-state drives for data centres. NAND is also built in layers, and more layers mean more capacity in the same area. In November 2024 SK hynix became the first company to mass-produce a NAND chip with more than 300 layers, at 321; a denser version storing more data per cell followed in August 2025.[36][37]
In October 2025 the company set out an "AI NAND" roadmap splitting future storage into three lines: AIN P for speed, AIN D for capacity, and AIN B for bandwidth. The last is built on a new design called High Bandwidth Flash, which SK hynix is developing into an industry standard together with SanDisk.[38]
Chip factories are known in the industry as fabs. SK hynix operates two large campuses in South Korea and three sites in China, and is building its first American plant.
The Chinese fabs became a regulatory problem in 2025. American export rules govern which chipmaking equipment may be sold to factories in China. SK hynix had held a standing permit covering its Chinese sites, but the United States revoked it with effect from 31 December 2025, replacing it with an annual approval process.[45][2]
SK hynix sits at the bottom of a three-step chain: SK Inc., the holding company of SK Group, controls SK Square, which together with its affiliates held 20.5% of SK hynix as of May 2026. The National Pension Service, South Korea's state pension fund, held 8.1%, and BlackRock 5.1%.[8] That 20% is not a coincidence. Korean competition law requires SK Square to keep at least a fifth of the shares, so the 2026 American share sale was sized to leave its stake just above that floor.[2]
Kwak Noh-Jung has been president and chief executive since 2022. Since March 2026 the board has been chaired by Ko Seung-Beom, an independent director — someone who is not an employee of the company. Six of the board's ten seats are held by independents.[5]
The main subsidiaries are Solidigm, the American drive maker built from Intel's storage division; SK keyfoundry in Cheongju and SK hynix system ic, both foundries — factories that make chips designed by other companies. SK hynix bought SK keyfoundry from MagnaChip in 2022 and renamed it at the start of 2024; it set up SK hynix system ic in 2017, with a plant in Wuxi.[1][46] In January 2026 the company announced that the Solidigm legal entity would be reorganised into an American AI solutions arm backed by a US$10 billion commitment, while the drive business continued under the Solidigm brand in a newly created company.[47]
Figures are as reported by the company. One trillion won is roughly US$700 million.[6][48]
| Period | Revenue | Operating profit | Net income |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY2024 | 66.19 | 23.47 | 19.80 |
| FY2025 | 97.15 | 47.21 | 42.95 |
| 1Q 2026 | 52.58 | 37.61 | 40.35 |
2025 was a record on every line. The ₩47.21 trillion operating profit exceeded Samsung Electronics' ₩43.53 trillion — the first time SK hynix had out-earned its larger domestic rival, and the highest operating profit reported by any Korean listed company for that year.[6][13] The first quarter of 2026 was stronger still, with an operating profit equal to 72% of revenue.[48] Capital spending has risen sharply with the AI cycle, from ₩8.3 trillion in 2023 to ₩27.5 trillion in 2025.[2]
Shareholder returns for 2025 came to ₩14.3 trillion: ₩2.1 trillion in dividends, and ₩12.2 trillion spent buying back and cancelling 15.3 million shares.[6]
Gartner ranked SK hynix the third-largest semiconductor company in the world for 2025, with revenue of US$60.6 billion, behind only NVIDIA and Samsung Electronics and ahead of Intel.[49]
The DRAM lead has changed hands twice in recent years. SK hynix overtook Samsung Electronics in early 2025 to lead the market for the first time in its history and held the position for three quarters. Samsung regained it at the end of 2025 and extended its lead through early 2026, when TrendForce put the split at Samsung 38.5%, SK hynix 28.8% and Micron 22.4%.[50][51] The swing reflects what each company sells rather than how well it performed. Contract prices for ordinary DRAM roughly doubled in early 2026 while HBM prices softened, which favoured the supplier with less HBM in its mix.[51]
In HBM itself SK hynix has led since the market became important, with reported shares ranging from about a half to about two thirds depending on the quarter and on the method of counting; Counterpoint Research put it at 57% of HBM revenue in the third quarter of 2025.[52] That success has left the company heavily dependent on one customer: NVIDIA accounted for around 27% of its revenue in the first half of 2025, up from 16% in 2024.[53] In July 2026 SK Group and NVIDIA announced an expanded partnership covering AI infrastructure in Korea, including a two-gigawatt AI facility that SK Telecom will operate from 2027 using SK hynix memory.[54]
In NAND, SK hynix and Solidigm counted together are consistently the second-largest supplier, behind Samsung Electronics.[55]
SK hynix shares have traded in Seoul for decades. On 10 July 2026 the company also listed in the United States, on the Nasdaq Global Select Market, under the ticker SKHY. American investors do not buy the Korean shares directly; they buy American depositary shares, certificates issued by a bank, with ten certificates representing one Korean share.[2][56]
The company sold 177.9 million of these certificates at US$149.00 each, raising US$26.51 billion — the largest share sale ever made in the United States by a foreign company.[2][57] Demand ran at more than seven times the shares on offer, and the price rose sharply on the first day of trading. The newly issued Korean shares behind the sale were listed in Seoul on 29 July 2026.[57][56]
The listing capped an extraordinary run. In June 2026 SK hynix had overtaken Samsung Electronics to become the most valuable listed company in South Korea for the first time.[58] It did not hold. On 13 July, three days after the American debut, the shares fell about 15% in a sell-off across the Korean market severe enough to halt trading.[59]
Speaking on the day of the listing, Kwak Noh-Jung said the industry was heading into the tightest memory shortage on record, with demand running ahead of supply "even beyond 2030".[60]
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World's 10 largest semiconductor companies
by 2025 revenue · Gartner, January 2026
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