The $720 billion AI memory bet: How SK Hynix is racing to build the factories of the future

South Korea is becoming the centre of an unprecedented race to expand memory-chip production, through the explosive growth of artificial intelligence. The reason behind the push is SK Hynix, which is committing hundreds of billions of dollars to expand its manufacturing footprint and meet what it expects to be sustained demand for advanced memory.

The company says its planned network of factories will become the world’s largest memory manufacturing complex. The scale of the investment shows how dramatically the economics of the memory business have changed as AI companies compete for limited supplies of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM.