SK Hynix shares hit record with news of AI memory milestone
The Seoul-traded chipmaker, whose shares are up roughly 90% over the past year, is now worth close to US$170 billion
[SEOUL] SK Hynix’s stock climbed as much as 5.9 per cent on Friday (Sep 12) to a record after the company announced it had completed development of HBM4, the next generation of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) crucial for artificial intelligence (AI) work.
The Seoul-traded chipmaker, whose shares are up roughly 90 per cent over the past year, is now worth close to US$170 billion. The company’s stock was on an eight-day winning streak ahead of the announcement, as bullish AI sentiment lifted key supply chain players. SK Hynix is the go-to HBM provider for Nvidia, surpassing much bigger rival Samsung Electronics to secure a lead in this advanced technology.
SK Hynix said on Friday that it’s now ready for mass production with HBM4. The development underscores the company’s effort to solidify its leadership in a rapidly growing and highly lucrative market. The company has benefited from being first to market, having shipped the world’s first 12-layer HBM4 samples to customers early this year, ahead of competitors such as Micron Technology and Samsung.
Joohwan Cho, SK Hynix’s head of HBM development, described the step towards mass production as a “new milestone for the industry” in the company’s announcement. SK Hynix’s HBM4 doubles the bandwidth of its predecessor and improves power efficiency by more than 40 per cent, the company said. The upgraded memory will boost AI service performance by as much as 69 per cent, solving data bottlenecks and lowering power costs for data centres, SK Hynix said. BLOOMBERG
