WSJ "NVIDIA Partner SK Hynix Emerges as Early AI Winner"

"Betting on HBM 10 Years Ago... Dominating the Hottest Semiconductor"

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in the United States has spotlighted SK Hynix, a partner of Nvidia, a leading American semiconductor company in the artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor market.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

On the 27th (local time), WSJ published an article titled "SK Hynix Stock Soars as Nvidia’s AI Chip Partner," evaluating that SK Hynix dominates one of the hottest semiconductor sectors in the world.

SK Hynix is a major supplier of the latest high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for Nvidia’s premium AI processor chips. HBM vertically stacks multiple DRAM chips to dramatically increase data processing speeds compared to conventional DRAM. It is essential for AI, which requires large-scale data training.

WSJ stated, "SK Hynix has long been a key player in the memory chip sector but was not considered a pioneer. However, by betting more aggressively on HBM than competitors a decade ago, it emerged as one of the early winners in AI applications."

Accordingly, SK Hynix’s stock price has risen about 60% since the beginning of the year despite the memory semiconductor downturn. This is three times Samsung Electronics’ increase rate and significantly exceeds the approximately 30% rise of Micron and Intel.

WSJ noted that SK Hynix, together with the U.S. semiconductor company AMD, was the first to introduce HBM to the market in 2013. The latest 4th generation version stacks 12 DRAM chips instead of the previous 8, offering industry-leading data transfer efficiency and heat dissipation. SK Hynix announced on the 21st that it developed HBM3E, capable of processing data equivalent to more than 230 full HD movies in just one second.

Park Myung-jae, Vice President and Head of Memory Product Design at SK Hynix, said, "Our HBM task force team initially did not consider AI as the chip’s application. However, we were confident that HBM for high-performance computing would eventually lead to related applications."

WSJ reported that while Samsung Electronics could challenge SK Hynix’s leading position, experts regard SK Hynix as the company best prepared to meet Nvidia’s demands.

WSJ introduced an interview with Vice President Park, stating, "SK Hynix still holds an advantage in development speed, quality, and mass production readiness," and that the company plans to continue leading the market based on these strengths.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.