SK hynix gives boost to chip exports to Taiwan

SK hynix's headquarters in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province (Newsis)

South Korea’s chip exports to Taiwan have surged on the back of increased SK hynix shipments for Nvidia, data showed Sunday.

According to the data compiled by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and the Korea International Trade Association, Korea’s memory chip exports to Taiwan amounted to $4.26 billion in the January-June period this year, up 225.7 percent from a year ago.

During the same period, the nation’s total memory chip exports increased 88.7 percent on-year.

Industry sources say SK hynix, the world’s No. 2 memory maker, is believed to have boosted memory exports overall as it has been increasingly shipping its high bandwidth memory chips to Taiwan, home to TSMC, the global foundry leader and the key partner of Nvidia, the US chip giant.

Nvidia, a fabless chip design company, entrusts the production of its graphic processing units to TSMC. The Taiwanese firm packages the GPUs along with HBM chips supplied by SK hynix and Micron Technology to produce AI accelerators for Nvidia.

Currently, SK hynix is the only Korean chipmaker to supply HBM chips to Nvidia. Samsung Electronics, the world’s No. 1 memory chip maker, is also carrying out qualification tests to supply its fifth-generation HBM3E chips.

Since the 2010s, Korea’s annual memory chip exports to Taiwan have hovered in the range between $1 billion and $4 billion. This year, the figure is likely to exceed a record $8 billion, the data showed.

Taiwan used to be the nation’s fifth-largest export market for memory chips. In the first half of this year, it rose to third place, outpacing Vietnam and the US.

By Jie Ye-eun(yeeun@heraldcorp.com)