high‑bandwidth memory

South Korea’s SK Hynix is evaluating a U.S. stock‑market listing, potentially using about 2.4 % of its treasury shares as American Depositary Receipts. The move follows a 230 % surge in its Seoul share price driven by booming AI hardware demand. A U.S. listing would give American investors direct access, improve liquidity, and narrow the valuation gap with peers like Micron and Samsung. SK Hynix is also expanding capacity, investing ~$4 billion in an Indiana advanced‑packaging fab and supporting a new domestic foundry project to secure its role in the AI‑driven memory market.

Micron announced it will exit the consumer “Crucial” memory business to focus on high‑performance AI chips and high‑bandwidth memory for data‑center workloads. The shift aims to meet surging AI‑driven demand and reallocate capacity to higher‑margin segments, despite a 3% stock dip after the news. Micron now competes with SK Hynix and Samsung as the sole U.S. supplier, supporting Nvidia, AMD and Google’s AI accelerators, while analysts raise its price target amid strong cloud‑memory growth.

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The AI surge is straining semiconductor supply chains, driving up prices of GPUs, DRAM, SSDs and LPDDR memory. Nvidia’s expanded demand for low‑power LPDDR—also used in premium smartphones—adds pressure to an already tight market. Analysts forecast memory‑chip costs rising 30 % later in 2025 and another 20 % in early 2026, potentially lifting device BOMs by 5‑10 %. Tech firms such as Xiaomi and Dell warn of higher retail prices, while other sectors risk cost spikes and delays as capacity shifts to AI data‑centers.