SK Hynix confirms new packaging plant in Indiana
South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix is to open a new US facility, which will produce high-bandwidth memory chips for integration with Nvidia’s GPUs.
At present, SK Hynix manufactures its HBM chips in South Korea. It then ships them to Taiwan, where TSMC integrates them into Nvidia’s graphics processing units alongside other TSMC-made processors. SK’s new packaging plant in Indiana will stack standard dynamic random access memory chips in order to create HBM chips.
This is manufacturing at the cutting edge of the market, since the chips are used to train advanced AI systems, large language models and more. Obviously, the move edges Nvidia a little closer to on-shoring its GPU production back to the US. As such it represents a success for the Biden administration and its Chips and Science Act. The US is said to have controlled just 3% of the world’s packaging capability in 2021.
It's believed the Indiana plant will be funded from a USD 22 billion investment in the US that was announced by the SK Group conglomerate’s chair Chey Tae-won during a conference call with President Biden in 2022.
