探访SK海力士：全球最大AI内存扩建现场

Memory is in the midst of an unprecedented moment, and it's led us to Korea to see this, the largest memory build out in the world by SK Hynix, which makes the majority of the world's high-bandwidth memory chips for AI inside their clean rooms where no media has ever set foot until now. In this place, HBM is assembled. This secretive Korean memory king is also the hottest new entrant to the U.S. Market, following a blockbuster Nasdaq debut in July.

It was the biggest foreign listing on the Nasdaq ever at $26 billion, and the appetite was insane. Demand for these tiny stacks of memory to enable AI has created such scarcity that the world's most valuable companies like Nvidia and Apple are scrambling to sign long-term contracts because what's long been considered a low margin commodity is now sending consumer electronics prices soaring. It's like a war. Everybody wants the memory chips.

Without that, they cannot produce it, their AI computing and AI chips. SK Hynix's answer, build like never before. $720 billion to triple capacity by 2034. But memory is a classic boom and bust industry. So what happens to all this investment and investor faith if it all goes bust? We cannot avoid a cycle. It's coming, especially against China. We flew to South Korea to visit for SK Hynix sites and see its massive operation there.

We decided to accelerate our timeline. This is a never before seen look inside the highly secured company from the largest factory being built in Korea to gowning up for an inside view of a clean room where memory is made to SK Hynix first ever U.S. facility coming in Indiana, plus a rare chance to sit down with the company's top executive and technology leads to ask about the huge risks they're taking in hopes that AI has changed the memory business for good.

Started as Sunkyong Textile Company as the Korean War was ending by the uncle of now Chairman Chey Tae-won, SK Group diversified from polyester to petroleum to telecommunications. It narrowly escaped the Asian financial crisis of 1997. As chairman Chey took over and set his sights on chips. I made a very risky bet at that time. In 2012, SK Group spent $3 billion for Hynix Semiconductor, a product of Hyundai's and LG's chip divisions, creating SK Hynix.

The next year, it unveiled the world's first high-bandwidth memory. Myeong-jae Park joined in 2014 and now leads HBM design. SK Hynix is the pioneer that created the first HBM. At that moment, there was no application or devices that needed that. But we had strong conviction. By 2015, SK Hynix sold the world's first commercial HBM on AMD's Radeon graphics cards. When Bitcoin miners started snatching up so many gaming GPUs around 2017, SK Hynix finally started seeing returns on its bet.

So did the company's top rival, Samsung, also based in Korea. Samsung started HBM production later in 2015 and became Nvidia's original supplier the next year. But as the AI era kicked off with ChatGPT in 2022, SK Hynix was first to make HBM3 and Nvidia made the switch. SK Hynix remains Nvidia's primary HBM supplier today. We're here at SK Group's headquarters in Seoul. It's actually made up of more than 100 subsidiaries, and Chairman Chey Tae-won told me that SK Hynix is now its biggest asset.

Now, SK Hynix is the market share leader in HBM, and it briefly dethroned Samsung in June as South Korea's most valuable company, although it's now back in the number two spot. American investors scrambled to get shares popping the stock 13% on its first day of U.S. trading. The listing in the U.S. stock market is our dream come true. If it doesn't crash hard because the sustained demand about ten years into the future exists, these memory companies are going to be some of the cheapest valuations today, and they're going to have some of the biggest opportunities to rake in profits for the next decade.

High bonuses and stock options have sent SK Hynix employees to the top of Korea's highly competitive marriage market. That's a pick up line in the bar, hey yeah I work at SK Hynix. It's created generational wealth, but of course you can also lose it if it goes the wrong way. Indeed, those gains have largely disappeared amid chaos in chip stocks and the Korean market as a whole, a situation that now impacts U.S. investors, too.

It's one of the most volatile markets out there. The index swings like a single stock, AI stock on the in the U.S. It's in this volatile moment that the company is undergoing its biggest buildout in history. Roughly equivalent to 600 soccer fields. We plan to build four fabs, including the first fab featuring six clean rooms. We're standing in the middle of what's going to be the largest memory fab in the world. It's called the Yongin cluster. 45 million square feet.

Construction began in 2023, and the first of these four fabs is scheduled to open here in February. The whole complex will cost around $400 billion. What's different about this fab from others I've seen is that it's stacked up instead of sprawling out, because the mountains all around us had to be flattened to make room for the big plans in the limited space available. South Korea is small, and some 70% of it is covered in mountains, leaving little room left to build.

This huge area was a mountain. The Korean government has a chip support package now worth up to $22 billion that's been helping SK Hynix with infrastructure needs at Yongin, like flattening those mountains. It's part of a larger plan unveiled by the South Korean government in June to double the country's memory production in five years. It includes multiple new mega fabs from Samsung, some of which we saw being built at its Pyeongtaek campus and a future SK Hynix cluster planned in the southwest of the country.

We hear that all the hotels nearby the Pyeongtaek and this SK is fully booked. If you name any company in the Big Tech, they are all in Korea to sign a contract. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia or AMD. Everybody is coming. Now the Korean president is urging speed. It's urgent because Big Tech companies are aggressively courting SK Hynix and rivals in a rush to secure supply. AMD's Lisa Su and Nvidia's Jensen Huang both held memory meetings in Korea in recent months.

We drank beer and Korean soju together. Huang signed this SK Hynix wafer with a clear message: please make more. That's Jensen's. Yes. Is he one of your friends? And who are some of your other friends in the AI world? Microsoft's Satya and Google's Sundar and well, Mark from Meta and they are my friend and well, I occasionally meet them. Memory is why Amazon just upped its 2026 CapEx estimate from $200 billion to $220 billion, and at Apple, the memory crunch contributed to weak guidance and rising iPad and MacBook prices.

The price of the chip is too high, and even Apple, they have to raise it, the price. And that actually increased all the prices to the society. So that's not really good. So I don't want that. Prices and scarcity are so bad that it's fueled the success of new chip entrants like D-Matrix, Groq and Cerebras that take a totally different approach that reduces reliance on DRAM that's in shortest supply. Cerebras had a blockbuster IPO in May, while Groq was acquired by Nvidia in December.

Now, Nvidia is reportedly testing out lower memory versions of its next GPU, too. If these approaches work, it could reduce the appetite for HBM. Memory demand has not historically held up long, but SK Hynix says this time is different. To meet customer pressure that's at an all time high, construction here was sped way up. We are targeting completion of the fourth fab by 2033, 12 years ahead of our original schedule.

To understand why there's such a rush, let's talk about what SK Hynix makes and how it happens. High-bandwidth memory, HBM, is the type of memory where SK Hynix dominates, selling the majority of the world's supply. HBM is made from stacks of DRAM, short-term memory chips, enabling rapid data access so processors can execute