Seoul: SK Group will actively respond to the growing supply bottleneck in memory chips by expanding its production capacity, as announced by the head of the South Korean conglomerate. This move comes amid the rapid growth in demand for memory products within the artificial intelligence (AI) sector.
According to Yonhap News Agency, SK Chairman Chey Tae-won addressed the issue in a keynote speech at the SK AI Summit in southern Seoul, highlighting the industrywide concerns over memory chip shortages due to surging AI demand. Chey revealed that SK hynix Inc., the group's chipmaking arm, is set to begin operations at the M15X fab in Cheongju next year to meet these demands. Furthermore, the Yongin semiconductor cluster is expected to significantly contribute to SK's production capacity by 2027.
Chey also emphasized SK's established technological capabilities, noting that even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang no longer questions the speed of SK's technology development. Following discussions with Huang, SK and Nvidia plan to cooperate on building a manufacturing AI cloud using Nvidia's Omniverse platform, a digital twin system for virtual simulation of manufacturing processes.
Chey underscored the essential role of AI in solving AI-related challenges and announced plans to accelerate memory chip production while expanding AI applications in data center automation. He acknowledged the unpredictable future of the AI industry but pointed out the significant annual investment growth by global tech giants in AI infrastructure.
Chey further stated that the business-to-business AI industry is poised for explosive growth as companies adopt AI to avoid falling behind competitors. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed hope for closer cooperation with SK Group, following his recent discussions with President Lee Jae Myung on AI's potential to enhance societal connectivity.
During Altman's recent visit to South Korea, OpenAI announced its partnership with SK Group on the Stargate project, with SK hynix aiming to meet the high-performance dynamic random access memory demand of 900,000 wafers per month. Altman praised Korea's leadership in global AI adoption and expressed excitement about collaborating with SK to establish AI data centers in Korea.
Chey expressed confidence in SK hynix's high bandwidth memory products, citing Nvidia's recognition of SK as a major supplier. However, he ruled out pursuing mergers and acquisitions to boost memory production capacity, emphasizing the importance of self-reliance in this area.
Chey concluded by noting South Korea's timely entry into the AI ecosystem, apart from the United States and China, and highlighted the importance of effectively utilizing data centers and GPUs for future progress.