SK Hynix, the South Korean memory chipmaker, has reportedly chosen the state of Indiana in the US, for where it plans to build its next manufacturing facility outside of its home country. The information comes from an unnamed US Official who spoke to the Financial Times (warning: paywall), saying that such a facility would effectively bolster the US’ ability to product more advanced chips on its homegrown and reduce its reliance on the country of Taiwan for such components in the future.
Though SK Hynix has yet to confirm the plans for an Indiana facility, it is possible that the upcoming manufacturing plant may produce HBM chips, which are typically used in HPC and datacentre GPUs. With the Taiwanese foundry already building two advanced fab plants in Arizona, this would effectively allow hardware manufacturers like GPU maker NVIDIA, to have its future GPUs manufactured on US soil.
“If SK Hynix builds an advanced packaging plant for HBM memory in the US, together with TSMC’s Arizona fabs this means Nvidia could eventually be able to have its GPUs produced in the US,” Kim Yang-paeng, a researcher at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, said.
As of 2021, the US holds just 3% of the world’s packaging capability but after the Biden administration signed its US$3 billion (~RM14.17 billion) CHIPs act, it hopes to make the country a home for “high-volume advanced packaging facilities” by 2030.
