SK Hynix's investment in the US may be crossing a boundary previously deliberately reserved. On September 16, Reuters quoted three people familiar with the matter as saying that SK Hynix is discussing with Intel the first memory chip manufactured in the US. One option is to rent part of Intel's fab in Ohio; the other, bolder solution, is for SK Hynix, Intel, and large cloud computing companies that want to lock in memory supply to form a joint venture. Negotiations are still in the exploration phase, and it is uncertain whether DRAM, NAND or other products will be produced. SK Hynix later stressed that it has not yet decided to cooperate with a specific company, nor has it finalized the US memory production plan. In August of this year, SK Hynix just held a groundbreaking ceremony for the Indiana plant, with a total investment of more than 4 billion US dollars, and plans to mass-produce the next generation HBM in the second half of 2029. The project was packaged as the first “Made in America” HBM base, but the core DRAM wafers are actually still produced in Korea and shipped to the US for advanced packaging and testing. In other words, the US has obtained a very important part of the HBM industry chain, yet it has yet to obtain SK Hynix's core pioneering wafer manufacturing. Now that we're talking about the Ohio Project, the nature is different. If SK Hynix actually moves DRAM wafer manufacturing to the US, the localization of US semiconductors will go from “putting the last few key processes in the US” to “making the core chip itself also in the US.”

SK Hynix's investment in the US may be crossing a boundary previously deliberately reserved. On September 16, Reuters quoted three people familiar with the matter as saying that SK Hynix is discussing with Intel the first memory chip manufactured in the US. One option is to rent part of Intel's fab in Ohio; the other, bolder solution, is for SK Hynix, Intel, and large cloud computing companies that want to lock in memory supply to form a joint venture. Negotiations are still in the exploration phase, and it is uncertain whether DRAM, NAND or other products will be produced. SK Hynix later stressed that it has not yet decided to cooperate with a specific company, nor has it finalized the US memory production plan. In August of this year, SK Hynix just held a groundbreaking ceremony for the Indiana plant, with a total investment of more than 4 billion US dollars, and plans to mass-produce the next generation HBM in the second half of 2029. The project was packaged as the first “Made in America” HBM base, but the core DRAM wafers are actually still produced in Korea and shipped to the US for advanced packaging and testing. In other words, the US has obtained a very important part of the HBM industry chain, yet it has yet to obtain SK Hynix's core pioneering wafer manufacturing. Now that we're talking about the Ohio Project, the nature is different. If SK Hynix actually moves DRAM wafer manufacturing to the US, the localization of US semiconductors will go from “putting the last few key processes in the US” to “making the core chip itself also in the US.”