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How SK Hynix became the king of advanced memory chips

SK 海力士如何成为先进存储芯片之王

Its advantages will not protect it if demand falters

若需求疲软，其优势将无法保护它

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PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES 图片来源：盖蒂图片社

Jul 16th 2026 | SEOUL 首尔 | 5 min read

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I N THE EARLY 2000s a sharp downturn in the market for memory chips pushed Hynix Semiconductor, as it was known at the time, to the brink of collapse. Sales fell by half, and the South Korean company’s market capitalisation sank to just above $500m. A decade of brutal restructuring ensued, during which it narrowly survived an effort by Micron, an American competitor, to buy it for parts. In 2012 the floundering chipmaker was acquired by SK Group, a local conglomerate.

21 世纪初，内存芯片市场的急剧衰退曾将彼时名为海力士半导体的企业推向崩溃边缘。销售额腰斩，这家韩国公司的市值跌至仅 5 亿多美元。随后长达十年的残酷重组中，它险险避过美国竞争对手美光科技将其收购拆解的企图。2012 年，这家挣扎求存的芯片制造商被韩国财阀 SK 集团收购。

These days things look very different for SK Hynix. In June it briefly dethroned Samsung Electronics as South Korea’s most valuable company. It is now neck-and-neck with its long-time rival in the global market for memory chips, and well ahead in the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) required for artificial intelligence.

如今 SK 海力士的境况已截然不同。今年 6 月，它曾短暂超越三星电子成为韩国市值最高的企业。在全球内存芯片市场，这家公司已与长期竞争对手并驾齐驱，而在人工智能所需的高带宽内存 (HBM) 领域更是遥遥领先。

CHART: THE ECONOMIST 图表:《经济学人》

The AI boom has fuelled a vertiginous rise in SK Hynix’s market capitalisation, which in May passed $1trn. On July 10th the company listed its shares on America’s Nasdaq exchange, raising $26.5bn in the process, a record for a foreign company. Although its share price slumped on the following trading day, with investors wary of the increasingly lofty valuations of chipmakers, it is still up by around 1,000% since the start of 2025. The money raised in the listing, along with the $50bn of

cash its operations generated in the 12 months to March, will fund an ambitious expansion (see chart). "We’re going to double our whole capacity in

the next five years," Chey Tae-won, the chairman of SK Group, pledged last month. Appetite for its chips is voracious: sales in its most recent quarter were triple the level a year earlier.

人工智能热潮推动 SK 海力士市值飙升，5 月突破 1 万亿美元。7 月 10 日，该公司在美国纳斯达克交易所上市，募资 265 亿美元，创下外国公司募资记录。尽管次日股价因投资者对芯片制造商日益高企的估值持谨慎态度而下跌，但自 2025 年初以来仍累计上涨约 1000%。上市募集的资金，加上截至 3 月的 12 个月内运营产生的 500 亿美元现金，将用于雄心勃勃的扩张计划（见图表）。SK 集团会长崔泰源上月承诺："未来五年，我们将把整体产能翻一番。" 市场对其芯片需求旺盛：最近一个季度的销售额是去年同期的三倍。

SK Hynix cannot take credit for the AI boom. But its turnaround is remarkable nonetheless. The chipmaking industry’s intense capital requirements and technological sophistication favour incumbents. Underdogs rarely pull ahead. How has SK Hynix done it?

SK 海力士虽不能将 AI 热潮归功于自身，但其转型成就依然令人瞩目。芯片制造业对资本和技术的高要求有利于现有企业，后来者鲜少能脱颖而出。SK 海力士是如何做到的？

Part of the explanation lies in its nimbleness. Stuck in the shadow of Samsung, which controlled around 40% of the memory market (against Hynix’s roughly 25%) in the early 2010s, the runner-up started looking for ways to leapfrog the competition. Identifying novel ways to circumvent the physical limits of increasingly tiny chips became a focus, recalls Park Sung-wook, its chief executive in 2013-18. Opportunity struck in 2008 when AMD, an American company that itself played second fiddle to Intel, asked SK Hynix to create a new form of stacked memory chip for a graphics processor. The pair had previously worked together on an earlier graphics-memory chip that had proved a great success. Although the early trial of HBM, launched in 2013, proved too pricey for customers, it demonstrated that stacking memory chips vertically could achieve significantly faster speeds.

部分原因在于其灵活性。2010 年代初，三星控制着约 40% 的内存市场（而 SK 海力士仅占约 25%），作为市场第二的 SK 海力士被三星的阴影笼罩，开始寻找超越竞争对手的方法。2013-2018 年担任首席执行官的朴成旭回忆道，寻找创新途径来突破日益微小的芯片的物理极限成为重点。2008 年，机会降临——当时同样屈居英特尔之后的美国公司 AMD，请求 SK 海力士为其图形处理器开发一种新型堆叠式内存芯片。两家公司此前曾合作开发过一款图形内存芯片，并大获成功。尽管 2013 年推出的 HBM 早期试验因价格过

高而令客户望而却步，但它证明了垂直堆叠内存芯片能够实现显著更快的速度。

Missteps from rivals provided an added boost. In 2019 Samsung downsized its HBM team to invest in other types of chips. Engineers who still believed in the technology fled to SK Hynix. A crop of engineers from Intel, which was struggling with product delays, joined the South Korean memory-maker too.

竞争对手的失误也提供了额外助力。2019 年，三星缩减了其 HBM 团队规模，转而投资其他类型的芯片。仍相信这项技术的工程师纷纷投奔 SK 海力士。一批来自英特尔（当时正因产品延迟而陷入困境）的工程师也加入了这家韩国内存制造商。

Corporate culture has also played an important part. Samsung is known to reward internal competition through a cut-throat meritocracy. SK Hynix, on the other hand, embraces collaboration. Hyun Sun-yeop, its former human-resources chief, argues that company-wide practices such as frequent one-on-ones let employees speak out and share information, in contrast with Samsung’s more hierarchical and siloed environment.

企业文化也发挥了重要作用。三星以通过残酷的精英制度奖励内部竞争而闻名，而 SK 海力士则倡导协作。其前人力资源负责人玄燮表示，公司范围内的做法，如频繁的一对一交流，让员工能够畅所欲言并分享信息，这与三星更为等级森严、部门壁垒分明的环境形成鲜明对比。

Engineers are also encouraged to tinker, with unsuccessful projects turned into “failure case studies”. That has led to innovations such as “mass reflow-molded underfill”, which packages together stacked chips by filling gaps between them with a moulding liquid, helping to dissipate heat. Such techniques helped SK Hynix beat Samsung to market with HBM3, the fourth generation of the product, in 2022, making it the sole supplier of cutting-edge memory to Nvidia, the king of AI chips.

公司还鼓励工程师进行创新尝试，将未成功的项目转化为 "失败案例研究"。这一机制催生了 "大规模回流模塑底部填充" 等创新技术——通过向堆叠芯片间的缝隙注入模塑液体进行封装，从而提升散热效率。正是凭借这类技术，SK 海力士在 2022 年抢先三星推出第四代 HBM3 产品，成为 AI 芯片霸主英伟达尖端存储器的独家供应商。

SK Hynix could still falter. It has never faced such a position, as a market leader during a period of relentless expansion. Samsung and Micron are

catching up; both are set to supply some HBM for Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin server rack, and Samsung has been regaining its lead in conventional memory. The three businesses, which together dominate the memory market, have all unveiled dizzying investment plans. Last month the two South Korean giants announced over $2trn of investment up to 2040, including in a “megacluster” of chip facilities in Yongin, a city near Seoul.

SK 海力士仍可能遭遇挫折。它从未在如此激进的扩张期担任过市场领导者的角色。三星和镁光正在追赶——两家公司都将为英伟达即将推出的 Vera Rubin 服务器机架供应部分 HBM，而三星已在传统存储领域重夺领先地位。这三家共同主导存储市场的企业，均公布了令人目眩的投资计划。上月，两家韩国巨头宣布截至 2040 年将投入超过 2 万亿韩元，其中包括在首尔近郊龙仁市建设芯片设施 "超级集群"。

A trip down memory lane

存储往事

Soaring demand and fierce competition increase the risk of over-investment, a regular feature of boom periods in the notoriously cyclical memory market. At the peak of the last cycle, in 2018, SK Hynix’s capital expenditure hit $15bn (or 40% of revenue). Then in 2019 a slowing server market led to a halving of memory prices. The firm’s sales fell by 33% the following year, while steep fixed costs meant operating profits collapsed by 87%.

需求激增与激烈竞争加剧了过度投资的风险，这是以周期性剧烈波动著称的存储市场在繁荣期的常态。在上一个周期顶峰的 2018 年，SK 海力士资本支出高达 150 亿美元（占营收 40%）。随后在 2019 年，服务器市场放缓导致存储价格腰斩。次年该公司销售额下降 33%，而高额固定成本更使营业利润暴跌 87%。

This time the company has promised to limit capital spending to about a third of revenue (over the past 12 months it has averaged 22%). It also insists that long-term supply agreements, negotiated on more stringent terms than in the past, give it years of visibility on sales. That may help the eventual down-cycle to “not be as violent”, says Jing Jie Yu of Morningstar, a research firm. But even if demand remains high relative to the past, any reduction could arrive just as the new capacity currently being built comes online. Bernstein, a broker, reckons that memory prices, which have risen nearly ten-fold in the past year, will probably peak next year, precipitating a 45% drop in sales at SK Hynix in 2028. Rising Chinese memory-makers such as CXMT and YMTC could add to the excess supply.

此次该公司承诺将资本支出控制在营收的三分之一左右（过去 12 个月平均为 22%）。它还坚称，通过比以往更严格的条款谈判达成的长期供应协议，使其能够提前数年预判销售情况。研究公司晨星的余静洁表示，这或许有助于最终的下行周期 "不那么剧烈"。但即便需求相较过去仍保持高位，任何需求下滑都可能恰逢当前在建的新产能投产之际。券商伯恩斯坦估计，过去一年已上涨近十倍的内存价格，明年可能见顶，这将导致 SK 海力士 2028 年销售额暴跌 45%。中国新兴内存制造商如长鑫存储和长江存储的崛起，可能进一步加剧供应过剩。

SK Hynix also faces growing demands from politicians. It is under pressure from Lee Jae Myung, South Korea’s president, to expand capacity in the country’s less-developed south-west, where SK Hynix recently announced over $260bn-worth of investments to create another chipmaking cluster. Although the region is abundant in water and power, executives are wary of moving too much capacity away from Seoul, where talent and industrial networks concentrate. America, too, is prodding. Howard Lutnick, its commerce secretary, is reportedly in talks with the chipmaker to build more in America. The firm has already committed to a $4bn facility in Indiana. SK Hynix is discovering that success brings challenges of its own. $\blacksquare$

SK 海力士还面临着政界日益增长的需求。韩国总统李在明向其施压，要求扩大该国欠发达的西南部地区的产能。SK 海力士近期宣布在该地区投资超过 2600 亿美元，以打造另一个芯片制造集群。尽管该地区水资源和电力充足，但高管们对将过多产能迁出首尔持谨慎态度——首尔集中了人才和产业网络。美国也在施加压力。据报道，美国商务部长霍华德·卢特尼克正与该芯片制造商洽谈，希望其在美国扩大建设。该公司已承诺在印第安纳州投资 40 亿美元建设一座工厂。SK 海力士正发现，成功本身也带来了挑战。 $\blacksquare$