SK Group Chair urges update to adaptive chip strategies

[Courtesy of SK]

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won urged the group’s chipmaking arm to bolster its response to the rapidly changing semiconductor cycle, underscoring the importance of recognizing the broader macroenvironment.

SK Group said on Thursday that Chey visited SK hynix Inc.’s Icheon facilities that day to oversee the artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor business. During the visit, he discussed the growth drivers of AI memory chips, including high bandwidth memory (HBM), and the overall management direction throughout 2024, alongside SK hynix Chief Executive Officer Kwak Noh-jung and other key executives.

“The ups and downs in the chip industry cycle have now become shorter and deeper. We will need to adapt our management and business plans to keep up with the rapidly changing cycles,” Chey said. He also called for an understanding of the macroenvironment rather than focusing on specific product categories, with a focus on each market fragment instead of viewing it as the overall global market. “We need to create and examine cycle and business prediction models from various perspectives,” he said.

Regarding the AI chip strategy, Chey emphasized understanding the industry landscape “from the customer perspective,” such as understanding the demand from big tech companies for their data centers. Chey plans to visit the Consumer Electronics Show 2024 next week to examine global AI trends.

HBM is a high-performance DRAM that stacks multiple DRAM dies vertically to increase data processing speed compared to conventional DRAMs and which is considered a core component of AI chips. SK hynix recently founded a dedicated organization for AI infrastructure and created a dedicated HBM business unit under its umbrella to expand its AI business.

Chey himself also has a keen interest in the group’s HBM business. Earlier in December 2023 during his visit to Silicon Valley, he received reports on the status of the HBM business from SK hynix’s U.S. subsidiary. During the visit, Chey also visited Gauss Labs Inc., an AI research and development company formed in the area by SK Group. SK hynix is improving production efficiency and yield by introducing Gauss Labs’ AI solutions into chip processes.

Chey also visited the Yongin semiconductor cluster under construction in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, in September 2023. SK hynix plans to start construction of the first fab in March 2025, which is scheduled for completion in May 2027.