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SK Hynix invests $4 billion in American factory

Translate from : SK Hynix investerer 4 mia $ i amerikansk fabrik

SK Hynix, the world's second largest memory chip maker, announces that it will build its first US manufacturing facility in the city of West Lafayette, with plans to begin mass production in the second half of 2028. The facility will focus on the production of next-generation "High-Bandwidth Memory" (HBM ) chips, crucial components of the graphics processors that train AI systems.

SK Hynix has become a key player in the AI development boom as the leading designer and manufacturer of HBM chips that work in concert with Nvidia's processors. Their decision comes approximately two years after the company's plans to invest in the United States.

At the time, SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won said his conglomerate would devote $15 billion to building chip plants and strengthening research programs in the United States. SK Hynix's project marks a significant step forward for US ambitions to increase advanced packaging capacity - a bottleneck in Washington's efforts to revive the domestic semiconductor industry.

The U.S. has only 3 percent of the world's packaging capacity, meaning companies that produce chips in America often still have to ship them to Asia to be assembled for use. Chips have become a battleground between Washington and Beijing, with the US spending billions of dollars to free itself from Asian suppliers. It has issued large financial incentives to get global chipmakers to increase capacity.

Semiconductor companies have pledged to invest more than $230 billion on American soil since President Joe Biden took office, driven by the 2022 chip legislation. Intel last month won $8.5 billion in grants and up to $11 billion in loans from the United States to support more than $100 billion in investment in its home country.

Most of these investments so far have gone to Texas, New York and Arizona. Arizona alone has secured over $60 billion in investment from TSMC, Intel, Amkor Technology and dozens of others. SkyWater Technology announced in 2022 their plan to build a $1.8 billion semiconductor research and manufacturing facility through a partnership with Indiana and Purdue.