SK hynix filed on the 23rd that it posted 3.76103 trillion won in operating profit in the first quarter of this year. That is five times the level of the same quarter last year and the largest quarterly result since its founding.
Quarterly revenue also jumped 198% over the same period to a record 5.25763 trillion won. With this, SK hynix set new records for both revenue and operating profit for the fourth straight quarter since the second quarter of last year.
Big Tech companies, including Nvidia, rushed to expand investments in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, driving a surge in demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a key chip. According to market researcher DRAMeXchange, the average price of DRAM that makes up HBM soared to $13 at the end of the first quarter this year, 10 times from $1.35 a year earlier. TrendForce said SK hynix captured a 59% share of the HBM market last year and is expected to maintain the industry's No. 1 position this year with a 50% share. Samsung Securities projected that SK hynix's DRAM production this year will increase 19.8% by capacity from last year.
NAND flash memory also underpinned results as Big Tech demand increased. NAND prices rose sevenfold in a year. As of the fourth quarter of last year, SK hynix held a 22.1% share of the NAND market, ranking second globally after Samsung Electronics at 28%. Nvidia plans to further stoke NAND demand by adopting "inference context memory storage (ICMS)," which assists computation based on NAND, in its next-generation AI accelerator "Vera Rubin" in the second half.
SK hynix recently began consecutive groundbreaking for a 19 trillion won fab (production facility) in Cheongju and a $3.87 billion (about 5.7 trillion won) fab in Indiana in the United States, and it plans to strengthen its response to the memory leadership race with Samsung Electronics and Micron by pushing ahead with construction of a 600 trillion won-scale fab in Yongin.