Speaking to reporters last Friday, SK Hynix Chief Executive Officer Kwak Noh-jung put forward a stark forecast: 2027 will bring the most severe memory supply crunch the industry has ever seen, and demand will keep running ahead of what his company can produce for years after that.
"We forecast that next year will be the worst year in the industry's history from the supply perspective," Kwak said. "Our customer demand continues to go up, while our capacity has limitations. We still forecast that customer demand will remain higher than our supply capacity even beyond 2030."
The interview took place on the same day SK Hynix made its Nasdaq $NDAQ debut. In a separate interview with Bloomberg, Kwak said the contract behavior of his customers tells its own story — buyers are locking in long-term agreements precisely because they do not see relief coming soon, a view that aligns with SK Hynix's internal projections extending into the next decade.
The AI infrastructure build-out has stoked demand for both conventional memory and high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, which is used alongside AI processors. That race to secure HBM has drained capacity away from consumer-facing segments of the market — chip buyers in the automotive, personal computer, and mobile phone industries have all felt the squeeze.
Last month, Nvidia $NVDA's Jensen Huang predicted that tight supplies of AI memory are not going away anytime soon, given the strength of current demand, and confirmed that SK Hynix holds the top spot among Nvidia's memory vendors. Micron $MU's chief executive, Sanjay Mehrotra, struck a similar tone last month on a post-earnings call, saying his company has no visibility into when chip output will finally draw even with what customers need, Bloomberg reported.
On the question of where SK Hynix might eventually build a new wafer fabrication plant, Kwak said a final choice has yet to be made among a field of candidates that includes the United States, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Adequate land, power, water supply, and access to a skilled workforce at reasonable cost are the thresholds any prospective site must clear.
SK Hynix's Nasdaq debut followed an ADR offering that attracted orders exceeding seven times the number of available shares, reflecting broad institutional demand. The ADR offering netted $26.5 billion — a record for any foreign company conducting a first-time sale of that type of instrument in the United States. SK Hynix stock closed up 13.3% at $168.85 on Friday.
The company posted record operating profit of 47 trillion won ($31 billion) for full-year 2025 — two times the earnings it generated in 2024 and a dramatic turnaround from the operating loss it reported just two years earlier.