Hot On The Heels Of Micron Bailing Out Of The Consumer RAM Market,...
No guesses as to what customer all this money is really for.
Even if you only have a passing interest in PCs and technology, it can't have escaped your notice that the whole industry has a problem with RAM. So you might think it's good news that SK hynix is said to be investing over half a trillion dollars in building new RAM factories, but the reality is that it won't make a jot of difference to the current crisis.
In any other year by 2025, news that a memory company is apparently investing approximately $540 billion in the construction of four new manufacturing plants would be viewed with shock and suspicion. That's because such a sum of money is way more than the typical cost of that many RAM foundries.
And yet, this is exactly what SK hynix is doing, according to a report from the Seoul Economic Daily (via Jukan on X). With approximately 35% of the DRAM market, SK hynix is second only to Samsung, and over the past 12 months, it's been steadily eating away at its South Korean rival's lead.
Neither company, though, are in a position where they can produce enough RAM to satisfy every demand. Put simply, it's all down to the astonishing growth of the AI server market. These immense data centers require huge amounts of system RAM and specialised high bandwidth memory (HBM) for the GPUs.
The demand is so high that the production of RAM for other sectors (general consumer, OEM, embedded, etc) is being curtailed, to allow SK hynix, Samsung, and others to chase after the AI money. So much so that only yesterday, Micron (the 3rd largest memory maker) announced that it will bail out of the consumer market entirely.
Since the only way to make more RAM is to have more RAM factories, that means investing lots of money in building new plants. Seoul Economic Daily (SED) writes: "SK [h]ynix is investing an astronomical amount of funds, reaching 600 trillion won, in the construction of the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster."
This cluster will comprise four new foundries, the first of which will start soon and is expected to be completed by 2027. However, SED points out that "the total investment was initially estimated at 120 trillion won [$82 billion], but the cleanroom size has expanded by more than 50%, and the combined impact of rising raw material prices and exchange rates has increased the total by more than fivefold."
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Source: PC Gamer
