South Korean chip manufacturer SK Hynix has reportedly chosen Indiana as the site for its new packaging plant.
According to a report in the FT, the new plant will specialize in stacking standard dynamic random access memory chips to create high bandwidth memory (HBM) ones, before they are integrated with Nvidia’s GPUs.
The news mimics the decision by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to build fabrication plants in Arizona. Currently, SK Hynix produces its HBM chips in South Korea and ships them to Taiwan where TSMC integrates them onto Nvidia GPUs. With both companies undertaking this process in the US, it will make it easier for Nvidia to produce all its GPUs domestically.
In 2022, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won met with Joe Biden and pledged that the company would invest $22 billion in US-based semiconductor, green energy, and bioscience projects. In the coming weeks, it's expected that President Biden will award billions of dollars in subsidies to chip companies such as Intel and TSMC in order to ramp up the production of semiconductors in the US.
SK Hynix has not publicly confirmed the FT report and there is no information on how much the plant will cost to build or how long it will take to be up and running.
TSMC has been plagued by succession challenges at its Arizona site, with the project suffering multiple delays and issues souring the necessary talent.
In January 2024, TSMC chairman Mark Liu admitted that production at the second, more advanced, fabrication plant wouldn’t be starting in 2026 as originally proposed. Instead, he said the site wouldn’t be operational until 2027 or 2028, and partially walked back on TSMC’s investment plan to build 3nm processors at this second fab.
