SK hynix invests 11 billion euros in new chip factory, to be finished in 2025

SK hynix will start construction of a new chip factory in the South Korean city of Cheongju in October. The new fab sees the company as an extension of an existing factory. The M15X factory will be a two-storey building on a 60,000 square meter site.

The new factory is called M15X, with which SK hynix indicates that the new factory is an extension of the existing M15 chip factory. that factory was finished in 2018. The company says it plans to build M15X on a 60,000 square meter site, which SK hynix previously bought for expansion.

The company says it is accelerating plans for M15X “given different market conditions.” What the original timeline was for M15X is not immediately clear. Demand for memory chips is now falling “rapidly” due to current economic conditions and “supply chain instability,” the company said.

According to SK hynix, experts predict that demand for memory chips will recover from 2024 and pick up again a year later. In order to meet the demand of that expected upturn, SK hynix M15X wants to build faster. The company is also looking at a next M17 factory, which it wants to make a decision about later.

SK hynix does not say what kind of memory chips it will produce in the new factory and what the expected capacity will be. In the current M15 fab, SK makes hynix nand memory, elsewhere it also makes dram. The company will invest 15 trillion won in M15X over the next five years, converted to 10.95 billion euros.