SK Hynix breaks ground on HBM hub

SK hynix is pouring 19 trillion won into a new Cheongju packaging plant as it races to expand the memory stacks that feed Nvidia-style artificial intelligence chips. (news.skhynix.com, koreatimes.co.kr) The South Korean chipmaker broke ground on April 22 for P&T7 in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province. The site will package artificial intelligence memory into finished products and run final testing before shipment. (koreatimes.co.kr, en.fnnews.com) High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, is a stack of memory chips bonded together so processors can move data faster and with less power. Packaging is the step that physically connects those stacks and checks them, which is why the back end of chipmaking now affects performance as much as the front end. (koreatimes.co.kr, epoch.ai) SK hynix said first-quarter revenue reached 52.5763 trillion won, operating profit hit 37.6103 trillion won, and net profit came to 40.3459 trillion won. The company said revenue topped 50 trillion won for the first time in a quarter, driven by sales of HBM, server dynamic random-access memory modules, and enterprise solid-state drives. (news.skhynix.com) Reuters reported SK hynix forecast that artificial intelligence chip demand will keep running ahead of manufacturing capacity. On the earnings call, HBM sales and marketing head Ki Tae Kim said customer requests for HBM supply over the next three years already exceed the company’s production capacity. (money.usnews.com) P&T7 is designed around that constraint. SK hynix said the fab will cover about 230,000 square meters, including 150,000 square meters of clean rooms, with 60,000 square meters for wafer-level packaging lines and 90,000 square meters for wafer testing lines. (koreatimes.co.kr, en.fnnews.com) The company plans to finish the wafer testing lines in October 2027 and the wafer-level packaging lines by February 2028. Korea Times said P&T7 will become SK hynix’s fifth production facility in Cheongju, alongside M11, M12, M15 and M15X. (koreatimes.co.kr, en.fnnews.com) That timing lines up with a wider squeeze in artificial intelligence hardware. Epoch AI estimated that the four largest AI chip designers used around 90% of global CoWoS packaging capacity and HBM supply in 2025, while using only about 12% of advanced logic die production. (epoch.ai) SK hynix is also spending beyond Cheongju. Reuters said the company expects 2026 investment to rise significantly from 30.2 trillion won last year, with money going to the Yongin cluster, the M15X ramp, and equipment purchases including 11.95 trillion won of ASML extreme ultraviolet tools through 2027. (money.usnews.com) The immediate result is simple: SK hynix is no longer just adding chip output. It is building more of the packaging and test capacity that now decides how many AI systems can actually ship. (koreatimes.co.kr, epoch.ai)