SK Hynix Spins Off Solidigm To Form A $10 Billion AI Company In The US
SK hynix is making a major investment on U.S. soil with the formation of an AI solutions firm that it is tentatively calling AI Company (or AI Co.). Most of the finer grain details are light at the moment, though from a high-level overview, the South Korean memory chip maker says its new firm will be focused on finding "new AI growth engines."
As expected, the bulk of these efforts, if not the entirety, will be aimed at the data center where AI is red hot right now. Notably, it was recently reported that SK hynix was three months ahead of schedule in opening a chip factory in Youngin, South Korea, as the company invests big money on riding the AI wave. There's more money to be made in the data center, which at least in the short term, has created a memory crisis in the consumer sector.
"Leveraging its unparalleled chip technologies, such as HBM, the memory chipmaker will try to play a pivotal role in delivering optimized AI systems for its customers in the AI datacenter sector. The company will also continue making strategic investments in and collaborating with AI firms to strengthen its competitiveness in memory chips and provide a range of AI datacenter solutions," SK hynix said.
SK hynix made the announcement on the heels of its best year ever, in which it posted record full-year revenue of 97.15 trillion won, or around $68 billion in U.S. currency, for an operating profit of 47.2 trillion won, or around $33 billion in U.S. currency.
"The results significantly exceeded the previous record set in 2024. The annual revenue increased by more than 30 trillion won while the annual operating profit nearly doubled year-on-year, marking the highest annual performance in the company’s history," SK hynix noted in its earnings release.
SK hynix has been benefiting from the AI boom with its memory chips, and in particular its high bandwidth memory (HBM) revenue, which more than doubled year-over-year to help drive its record performance. The quest is, are these good times sustainable, and SK hynix seems to think so.
"As the AI market shifts from training to inference while demand for distributed architectures expands, the role of memory will become increasingly critical. Accordingly, not only demand for high-performance memory such as HBM is expected to grow continuously, but also for overall memory products including server DRAM and NAND as well," SK hynix said.
Regarding the formation of the AI Company, SK hynix said it will go about it by restructuring Solidigm, its California-based subsidiary that makes enterprise solid state drives (SSDs). Solidigm is being spun off into a separate entity called Solidigm Inc.
Meanwhile, the AI Company will look at "securing opportunities in the emerging AI era" while working closely with global partners, SK hynix said.
