SK Hynix posts record quarterly profit amid AI boom
The world’s second-biggest memory chipmaker reported an operating profit of 7 trillion won (USD 5 billion) for the July-September quarter from a loss for the same period last year.
South Korean chipmaking giant SK Hynix has posted record quarterly profit on the back of strong demand for its high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in generative AI.
The world’s second-biggest memory chipmaker reported an operating profit of 7 trillion won (USD 5 billion) for the July-September quarter from a loss for the same period last year. This was higher than the 6.8 trillion won average forecast by LSEG SmartEstimate, according to a Reuters report.
HBM sales were up more than 70% from the previous quarter and total revenue for the quarter rose 94% year-on-year to 17.6 trillion won.
The Nvidia supplier said demand for HBM chips would continue to outpace supply in 2025.
“We believe that it is premature to talk about demand slowdown for AI chips and HBM at this point,” Kim Kyu Hyun, SK Hynix’s head of DRAM marketing, said during a conference call.
The company sees HBM sales comprising 40% of its total DRAM revenue for the fourth quarter, up from 30% in the third quarter.
“While the demand of memory for AI servers such as HBM and [high-density enterprise SSD] has grown noticeably this year, the company predicts that this trend will continue next year,” the company said in a press release.
“As the application of AI technology widens, the application of memory is also expected to broaden, leading to even more stable market growth for memory going forward,” said Kim Woohyun, vice president and chief financial officer at SK Hynix, during an earnings call.
Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that a design flaw with its latest Blackwell AI chips, which had hit production, had been fixed with the help of manufacturing partner TSMC.
Last month, SK Hynix said it had started mass production of HBM3E 12-layer chips.
