AIBRIEF
The South Korean memory maker is also committing US$38 billion to new DRAM and NAND flash memory fabrication plants at home, reshaping its footprint for the AI era.
SK Hynix, the South Korean memory-chip supplier that feeds high-bandwidth memory to Nvidia, is weighing options for a US$3 billion NAND packaging and testing plant in Chongqing, China, while committing US$38 billion to new DRAM and NAND fabs at home in South Korea.
Bloomberg reports the company is speaking with prospective advisers about a possible stake sale that may value the Chongqing asset at about US$3 billion, with suitors potentially including Chinese funds and industry players. SK Hynix may retain a minority stake. Deliberations are preliminary and may not lead to any transaction, per BusinessTimes, and an SK Hynix representative declined to comment.
Chongqing is a back-end packaging and testing base for NAND flash, not a leading-edge wafer fab, and a holdover from SK Hynix's more-than-20-year China footprint, according to the company.
The Korea side carries the larger capital weight. SK Hynix separately announced a 54 trillion won (US$38 billion) plan to build a new DRAM fab in Yongin and a NAND fab in Cheongju, framed as a response to AI-era memory demand. In July, SK Hynix raised US$26.5 billion in its US listing, the largest by a foreign company on American exchanges, giving it the balance sheet to fund both moves at once.