SK Hynix reported third-quarter revenue of 104.62 trillion won, up 327.9% year on year, and operating profit of 83.33 trillion won, surging 632.1%, with quarterly revenue exceeding 100 trillion won for the first time. The company expects HBM4 shipments and revenue to surpass HBM3E in the fourth quarter and said memory shortages will persist until 2030.
On October 22, SK Hynix said it would no longer pursue the U.S. IPO of Solidigm, its storage hardware design and manufacturing subsidiary, citing recent capital market conditions and share price movements, and noted the decision was not due to changes in the subsidiary's operating performance.
On October 21, media reported that Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix plan to upgrade their Chinese plants to produce NAND flash chips with over 200 stacked layers, in response to AI storage demand growth and to counter YMTC's competition. Samsung's Xi'an plant aims to convert lines to 286-layer V9 NAND, targeting 5,000 wafers per month by December 2026; SK Hynix plans to upgrade its Dalian plant to 240 layers or above.
SK hynix published research on 3D FeNAND enabling analog compute-in-memory (A-CiM) in an IEEE paper. The technology uses analog signals to perform multiply-accumulate operations in memory, reducing data movement and improving speed and energy efficiency. 3D FeNAND stores data via ferroelectric polarization states and can produce multiple current states in a single cell, suitable for AI weight data.
SK Hynix R&D head Ahn Hyun said AI infrastructure performance would grow about 20-fold by 2030, and that the company is developing next-generation memory technologies including 3D stacked DRAM and HBF, while upgrading existing HBM products.
At ISOCC 2026, SK hynix SoC design VP Koo In-jae highlighted structural limits of AI data centers and introduced the company's H-TPU architecture, a lightweight transaction-specific processor design for SSD control, claiming 1/25 area and about 2.5% power consumption of a general-purpose CPU core.
ASML has notified Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix of a uniform 10% price increase for replacement parts supplied in South Korea, covering all EUV and DUV lithography machine components, effective January 2027.
On September 28, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang met Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won in New York, with all three attending the Korea Society's annual dinner. As leaders of core companies in the global AI semiconductor supply chain, their meeting came about two months after their last gathering; the industry expects next-generation HBM supply and AI infrastructure cooperation to be key topics, though specific agenda items have not been disclosed.
SK Hynix's US NAND flash subsidiary Solidigm is considering an IPO as early as 2027, with a potential valuation of up to $150 billion and a planned raise of $15 billion.
Global macro investor Stanley Druckenmiller is making his first public visit to South Korea, meeting Doosan and Doosan Enerbility executives in Seoul on September 22, 2026, and planning visits to AI-related companies such as Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, Naver and Coupang to explore investment opportunities in AI infrastructure and energy. His Duquesne Family Office manages about $5.2 billion in assets.