SK Hynix will spend 80 trillion won, or roughly $51.46 billion, building a new NAND flash memory factory in Cheongju, South Korea, with production targeted to begin in the first half of 2029.
Chief executive Kwak Noh-jung announced the plan at an event attended by President Lee Jae Myung, folding the new fab, called M17, into a broader push by South Korea’s two memory giants to keep up with demand the industry is struggling to satisfy.
The announcement follows Samsung’s own $647bn domestic investment plan, unveiled days earlier for the same chip-starved corner of the country. The $51.46 billion figure covers the NAND fab alone.
SK Hynix’s total spending commitment, once a separate advanced packaging plant is included, rises to 100 trillion won, or about $64 billion.
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
That second facility, known as P&T7 and also sited in Cheongju, is intended for wafer-level packaging and is targeted for completion by 2027, two years ahead of the main fab. Reuters reported both figures, and Korean outlets corroborated the split between the two projects.
M17 will be SK Hynix’s fourth NAND fab and represents a bet that flash storage, long the less glamorous half of the memory business compared with the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that feed AI accelerators, still needs serious new capacity.
NAND chips handle long-term data storage in solid-state drives, distinct from the DRAM and HBM used as working memory inside AI servers.
Industry trackers including TrendForce and DigiTimes have flagged tightening NAND supply as datacentre operators buy up storage alongside compute, even as most attention around SK Hynix’s stock rally has centred on HBM.
President Lee’s government unveiled an investment plan worth somewhere between $520 billion and $576 billion, depending on which outlet’s tally you use, on June 29, with Samsung and SK Hynix both committing to new fabs and packaging lines across the Chungcheong region.
Reuters and Nikkei Asia have linked the spending spree to warnings that the global memory shortage, driven largely by AI datacentre buildouts, could persist into 2027 rather than easing this year.
That shortage has already rippled into consumer electronics. Memory prices have climbed sharply enough this year that Apple discontinued its entry-level Mac Mini, and DRAM buyers elsewhere have turned to alternative suppliers, including a reported shift by Corsair toward Chinese-made DRAM in some of its kits.
The scale of the response from SK Hynix and Samsung suggests both expect the squeeze to last well beyond the next product cycle.
Construction on M17 is expected to begin next year, giving SK Hynix roughly three years to bring the fab from groundbreaking to output, a typical timeline for a facility of this scale. Neither SK Hynix nor the South Korean government has detailed how the investment will be financed beyond the company’s own capital plans.
Cheongju, already home to SK Hynix’s existing NAND operations, is becoming the centre of gravity for the company’s storage ambitions well into the next decade.
SK Hynix overtook Samsung last year as South Korea’s most valuable listed company, a shift driven almost entirely by the HBM boom rather than NAND, which makes this fresh bet on flash storage notable in its own right.
NAND capacity additions rarely draw the same headlines as HBM supply deals, but the two product lines increasingly compete for the same wafer starts and packaging capacity inside SK Hynix’s Korean plants.
Executives at both companies have been candid that memory has become the bottleneck constraining how fast the wider AI industry can build.
South Korea’s government has framed the combined spending as a matter of national strategy, treating the country’s memory dominance as an asset worth defending through direct policy support.
Whether that translates into tax incentives or faster permitting for the Chungcheong region’s fabs has not yet been detailed publicly.
For now, the concrete commitment is SK Hynix’s own: two plants, one region, and a 2029 deadline.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
