SK Hynix has broken ground on a plant costing more than $4B in West Lafayette, Indiana, its first US base for packaging high-bandwidth memory, with production due in the second half of 2029. Intel’s equivalent assembly and testing plant near Wroclaw was cancelled last year after state aid had been approved.
SK Hynix has put a shovel in the ground in West Lafayette, Indiana. The plant will cost more than $4B, occupy 133.5 acres and become the company’s first base in the United States for packaging high-bandwidth memory, employing about 1,000 people.
The dates are a long way out. Chief executive Kwak Noh-Jung said the cleanroom should open by October 2028, with mass production of next-generation HBM starting in the second half of 2029.
What the plant does matters more than what it costs. Advanced packaging stacks finished chips into a single part, and it is the step that makes Nvidia’s most capable accelerators possible at all.
Washington is paying towards it. The CHIPS and Science Act allows SK Hynix up to $458M in direct funding and up to $500M in loans for the project.
