SK hynix Honam Fab: Chey Warns China Is Closing In
3 min readSK Group chairman Chey Tae-won has a blunt message for South Korea’s chip industry: build faster or get overtaken. Speaking in Shanghai on Sunday, Chey said the planned SK hynix Honam fab, part of a 400 trillion won (about $270 billion) semiconductor cluster, needs to move faster as Chinese and American memory rivals close the gap.
An AI Memory Boom With Too Few Factories
SK hynix is one of the world’s largest memory makers and a leading supplier of the high-bandwidth memory that sits beside AI accelerators in data centers. AI buildouts have turned memory into one of the tightest parts of the hardware supply chain, and the real constraint is now factory space. “Demand is enormous, and the problem is if we cannot add plants,” Chey said, according to the Seoul Economic Daily.
The company’s flagship expansion is its cluster in Yongin, south of Seoul. The Honam plan, in the country’s southwest, is currently about two-thirds the scale of Yongin and could grow if more land and demand become available.
What Chey Said About the SK hynix Honam Fab
Chey spoke at the 38th Shanghai Mayor’s International Business Leaders Advisory Council. He singled out China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), which he said are catching up fast on the back of strong domestic demand, along with U.S. rival Micron. “If we leave things as they are, we will be overtaken across the board,” he warned.
Two days earlier, Chey visited the Gwangju military airport, the planned site of the Honam fab, and said SK may need to build in Yongin and in the Jeonnam and Gwangju area in parallel. He added that building fabs overseas, including in Japan, is under review. SK also said it is pushing to open an AI research center in Shanghai focused on physical AI and biopharmaceuticals.
Why It Matters
Korea’s memory makers have been among the biggest winners of the AI boom, and Chey’s remarks suggest SK sees that lead as narrower than it looks. CXMT and YMTC have a huge home market behind them, while SK hynix says it cannot expand inside China, where it competes at a disadvantage. Chey, whose group has invested $60 billion in China over 35 years, also disputed the idea that blocking such investment would slow China’s chip industry.
Watch for a formal Honam timeline and any decision on a Japan fab. More SK capacity would ease AI memory shortages, but the urgency is a sign that the race to supply AI memory is getting crowded.