SK hynix has told investors that the memory shortage is not ending soon. The South Korean chipmaker said on 28 October that demand will keep exceeding supply through 2030, as it reported a third quarter with sales above 100 trillion won for the first time.
Revenue for July to September came to 104.6 trillion won, with an operating profit of 83.3 trillion won. That is an operating margin of 80%, up from 76% in the previous quarter and 47% a year earlier.
Where the money is coming from
The company says AI servers are driving the demand. DRAM growth came mainly from server DDR5, and the company began shipping HBM4, the stacked memory that sits beside AI accelerators, in volume. SK hynix expects HBM4 to pass the older HBM3E in both volume and revenue in the October to December quarter. The chip itself, in SK hynix’s September 2025 announcement, has 2,048 I/O terminals, twice the previous generation, which the company says doubles bandwidth. It also quotes operating speeds above 10Gbps against the 8Gbps JEDEC standard, and power efficiency up by more than 40%.
SK hynix’s overview of its memory strategy says that, working with TSMC, it is putting advanced logic process technology into the base die (the bottom chip of the stack) starting with HBM4. The roadmap graphic in that overview shows 12-high HBM4 samples in March 2025 and 12-high HBM4E samples in June 2026.
On the NAND side, 321-layer TLC enterprise SSDs sold more, and that process should account for over half of the company’s NAND capacity in Korea in the fourth quarter.
Profit after tax was 39.8 trillion won, a 38% margin. It fell 58% from the second quarter even though operating profit rose, and the company’s release gives no reason for the gap.
Contracts reaching into 2028
Fourteen big customers, cloud providers among them, have signed multi-year supply deals with the company. According to its earnings release, those contracts cover more than half of its production capacity for 2027 and 2028, and typically run five years. Extensions are under discussion.
Capacity is growing too. New capacity is coming: its M15X fab should be running flat out by the end of 2026, and the first phase of the Yongin campus starts full operation in 2027. The company says investment will rise significantly but that it will adjust the pace as needed.
Shareholders and a cancelled listing
The company plans to return about 100 trillion won to shareholders in 2026. The third quarter alone included a 14 trillion won dividend and a 20 trillion won buyback, half of which will be cancelled.
Chief executive Kwak Noh-Jung also confirmed that the planned Solidigm listing is off. “We concluded that proceeding at this time would not be the best way to achieve the originally anticipated outcome,” he said.
The release says nothing about phones or PCs, so any effect on gadget prices is for readers to watch, not something the company has stated.
