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Korean memory giant SK Hynix is in exploratory talks with Intel to make chips in the US for the first time. The friction is in Seoul, where the technology is treated as strategic.
SK Hynix is in exploratory talks with Intel to manufacture memory chips in the United States for the first time, according to three people familiar with the discussions. The deal's friction sits 6,000 miles from Ohio, in a Seoul government that treats the underlying technology as strategic and is widely expected to be the hardest obstacle.
Reuters reported on September 16 that the discussions are in an early stage and that no decisions have been made. Both companies confirmed the contact but declined to characterize it as a deal.
AI accelerators from NVIDIA and its peers run on high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a stacked form of DRAM that has become the chokepoint of the generative-AI buildout. The US government has spent two years pushing advanced chip capacity onshore. Intel's long-planned Ohio fab, originally a 2025 ground-break now stretched well past its opening date, has a floor that needs a tenant to justify it.
SK Hynix makes DRAM, the working memory in servers and PCs; NAND flash, the long-term storage in phones and drives; and HBM. None of those chips are made in the United States today. Any one of them showing up at an Intel fab would be a first.
Reuters' reporting sketches two shapes. In the first, SK Hynix would lease a portion of Intel's Ohio campus and run its own production lines inside an American fab for the first time. In the second, SK Hynix, Intel, and a group of US cloud companies would co-fund the operation, with the cloud companies underwriting memory supply for their own AI fleets, per two people familiar with that scenario.
The company is already building a $3.8 billion advanced packaging facility in the US, the part of the chip process that wires finished silicon together. A fab lease or joint venture would extend that footprint upstream into actual wafer production.
The constraint sits in Seoul, where the trade ministry has historically resisted overseas production of HBM and DRAM on the grounds that both qualify as national strategic technology. SK Hynix's own statement on the matter is deliberately narrow: the company is "reviewing various measures to strengthen memory competitiveness, including additional production bases," but "no matters have been determined" and "nothing has been finalized."
The South Korean trade ministry's public line is that any decision on US chip production is a call for SK Hynix, not the state. Read against the company's own caution, that posture reads as a delegation of a problem rather than a green light.
Intel declined to comment on the specific talks but reaffirmed that it is continuing to invest in Ohio to "prepare the site." The site, after multiple ground-break delays, needs an anchor tenant as much as SK Hynix needs a US address. Earlier Intel filings, including a Form 8-K filed in August 2025, provide general corporate context but do not address the September 2026 talks.
Investors priced the optionality on September 16. Intel opened 5.5% higher; SK Hynix finished the Seoul session 4.1% higher. That reaction is single-session color, not a verdict. It is, however, evidence that the deal logic is being read as commercial, not political.
Three signals would move this from exploratory to concrete: a South Korean trade ministry line that goes beyond "this is a company decision," which would either unlock the deal or kill it; a cloud-company confirmation, since the joint-venture scenario only works if at least one hyperscaler publicly underwrites the memory supply, and none has so far; and an Ohio site milestone, since Intel has broken ground, paused, re-scoped, and re-announced the Ohio fab over four years, and a dated, specific next step would be the first hard data point on whether a tenant is actually moving in.
Until one of those lands, the deal is what the companies say it is: talks, not a transaction.