AI's Memory Hunger Just Handed SK Hynix the Best Quarter in Its History
If you want proof the AI boom is still running hot, look at what's happening to the companies that make the memory chips. SK Hynix, the South Korean chipmaker that supplies much of the high-speed memory used alongside AI processors, just posted its best quarter ever, and investors loved it.
Third-quarter revenue came in at 104.62 trillion won (about $78.9 billion). That's the first time the company has cleared 100 trillion won in a single quarter, and it's more than four times what it made a year ago. Operating profit hit 83.33 trillion won, up 632% year over year, and both numbers comfortably beat analyst forecasts. The stock closed almost 11% higher on Wednesday.
The company is sharing a lot of that windfall. It announced plans to return around 100 trillion won to shareholders, including at least 30 trillion won in cash dividends and 60 trillion won in buybacks and share cancellations. Part of the dividend is a special payout funded by gains on its stake in Japanese chipmaker Kioxia.
What's driving all this is HBM, or high-bandwidth memory, the specialized chips that sit next to AI processors and move enormous amounts of data quickly. SK Hynix began mass production of its newest version, HBM4, last quarter and expects it to overtake the previous generation in both shipments and revenue by the fourth quarter. Prices for regular DRAM memory also rose sharply.
The longer-term outlook is the part people are buzzing about. SK Hynix says it has locked in long-term deals with 14 major customers covering more than half of its capacity for 2027 and 2028. It expects memory demand to outrun supply through 2030 and plans to spend significantly more next year. One cautious note: it shelved plans to explore an IPO for its U.S. storage unit, Solidigm, pointing to recent volatility in chip stocks.