South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc is considering options for its Chongqing, China-based facility, including bringing in an investor to help accelerate growth, people with knowledge of the matter said.The company, a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory chips to Nvidia Corp, is speaking with prospective advisers to help review the business, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information. A potential stake sale could value the facility at about US$3 billion, the people said.The Chongqing facility provides a large scale semiconductor packaging and testing base, helping boost the company’s NAND flash back-end production to grow globally.
The logo of SK Hynix is pictured at the company’s headquarters in Icheon on July 29.
Suitors may include Chinese funds and industry players, the people said. SK Hynix may retain a minority stake in the asset, they added.Deliberations are preliminary and may not lead to any transaction, the people said.
A representative for SK Hynix declined to comment.Separately, the company on Friday said it plans a 54 trillion won (US$38 billion) expansion of its chipmaking facilities in South Korea. It is to build a new DRAM manufacturing facility in Yongin and a NAND fabrication plant in Cheongju. The move, covering dynamic memory for the lowest latency and solid-state storage for fast access to greater quantities of data, is in response to “the continuously growing demand for memory in the artificial intelligence era,” SK Hynix said.The new Yongin Y2 would be the second of four fabs planned at the Yongin semiconductor cluster, SK Hynix said. The company intends to break ground on the project in July next year, targeting June 2029 for opening the first cleanroom en route to producing high-bandwidth memory and other next-generation DRAM. The Cheongju M17 expansion would break ground in February and its first cleanroom is targeted for the end of 2028. The investment period runs through April 2031.SK Hynix, along with Samsung Electronics Co, has made a large commitment to invest further in building up South Korea’s domestic manufacturing and AI capabilities. The country aims to double its memory production capacity within five years and secure world-class manufacturing capabilities to pull far ahead of competing nations, the government said in announcing a broad plan at the end of June.
