One of the world’s largest memory chip component manufacturers, SK Hynix, which has now surpassed Samsung Electronics as the most valuable company in South Korea, is reportedly no longer adding to its HBM memory production capacity used to power the seemingly endless AI data center hardware for now.
A report from Chosun Biz said that 40 percent of SK Hynix’s revenue previously came specifically from its HBM memory chip production, of which the company is the largest producer of HBM3E and, later, HBM4 components.
For HBM4 memory in particular, SK Hynix is seen as the primary memory supplier for Rubin’s AI processing platform. However, not many other platforms will use the memory, and their existing supply of HBM3E is sufficient for other companies’ AI memory needs for now.
Because of this, SK Hynix is also reported to be refocusing on the production of DRAM components for consumer electronics and devices, including DDR5 memory which is still seen as too expensive for the consumer market.
The report further states that SK Hynix executives have looked at the profit margins shown by Samsung Electronics which are seen as very high because no memory manufacturer is seen to supply enough DRAM components for the consumer market after they all moved to produce HBM and GDDR memory for AI companies.
This means that in the future, we may see RAM components for computers, laptops and smart devices return to normal, but whether we will see cheap memory prices before the “RAMpocalypse” incident is unknown.
The issue of RAM supply for ordinary users can be seen not only in the difficulty of obtaining supply of these components, but also in terms of their quite expensive prices. Many hope that memory prices can drop back to the levels before the middle of last year when they were not too expensive, but the expectation is that the price drop of these components may not be that high.
