An Nvidia (NVDA) partner in South Korea saw its shares surge Monday after it said the U.S.-based chipmaker wants chips faster.
SK Hynix’s South Korea–listed shares closed up almost 6.5% after SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won told reporters that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang asked the company to move supply of its next-generation, high-bandwidth memory chips up by six months.
Chey, speaking at the SK AI Summit in Seoul, added that Nvidia is still struggling to fulfill chip demand but that the two are working together on the shortage, Bloomberg reported.
Huang requested that SK Hynix provide samples of its HBM4 chips earlier than expected, Chey said. In October, SK Hynix said it expected to supply customers with the new HBM chip, which Nvidia needs for its artificial intelligence chips, by the second half of 2025. Chey said both Nvidia and SK Hynix “are on the same page” about HBM4’s schedule, according to Bloomberg.
The South Korea-based chipmaker’s shares are up 37.1% so far this year. The company also unveiled a 16-layer HBM3E at the summit that it said will be with customers early next year. SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung said the company will release the next-generation HBM5 and HBM5E sometime between 2028 and 2030.
In October, SK Hynix reported record revenue, operating profit, and net profit, “achieving best-ever quarterly performance” in the third quarter on demand for its memory chips for AI technology.
“SK Hynix has solidified its position as the world’s No.1 AI memory company by achieving the highest business performance ever in the third quarter of this year,” Kim Woohyun, chief financial officer at SK Hynix, said in a statement. “We will continue to maximize profitability while securing stable revenues by taking flexible product and supply strategies in line with market demand.”
