SK hynix eyes ‘overwhelming dominance’ in HBM4 competition
SK hynix's headquarters in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, Thursday. Yonhap
SK hynix said Thursday it is aiming for “overwhelming dominance” in the competition for high-bandwidth memory 4 (HBM4) to power next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators at Nvidia and other major tech companies.
During its fourth quarter 2025 earnings call, the company expressed confidence in its competition with Samsung Electronics and Micron over HBM4, saying that “customers show strong preference for our products and are prioritizing them in their orders.”
“Beyond having technological advantages, the trust we built with our customers and our experience of mass production represent competitiveness that cannot be matched in a short period of time,” the company said. “We are preparing HBM4 in line with customer schedules, and production is underway based on customer requests.”
SK hynix is believed to have secured more than two-thirds of the HBM4 supply volume for Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform. The company said it is seeking “overwhelming dominance” in HBM4.
The company stressed that its HBM4 is based on manufacturing processes that proved its stability in previous HBM3E and HBM3 series, saying that its HBM4 "has achieved the required performance, even based on the 1b process used in our current products.”
The comment was interpreted as targeting Samsung Electronics, which said during its earnings call on Thursday that its HBM4 is based on the 1c process.
The terms 1b and 1c refer to fifth- and sixth-generation 10-nanometer class processes, respectively. While the 1c process offers advantages such as improved power efficiency, it requires further stability validation than the 1b.
“Our goal is maintaining manufacturing yield levels comparable to those achieved with our HBM3E,” the company said.
SK hynix said surging memory chip prices are unlikely to slow the exponential growth in demand, while supply bottlenecks are expected to worsen in the second half of this year.
The company added that its inventories had already fallen sharply in the fourth quarter of last year, with NAND flash memory inventory also continuing to decline, including those for server and enterprise solid-state drives.
The trends have raised concern in the market over a potential slowdown in consumer demand for IT devices, but SK hynix said expectations for on-device AI will translate into new demand, so a broader contraction is unlikely.
The company expects this year’s capital expenditures (CAPEX) will increase significantly from last year, as it will expand production capacity, upgrade fabricating processes and increase infrastructure investments. “Despite the expected growth in our CAPEX, our sales this year are also likely to rise sharply, allowing us to maintain CAPEX level at around 30 percent of revenue,” the company said.
On Wednesday, SK hynix said it posted a record annual record operating profit of 47.2 trillion won ($33 billion) in 2025, beating its rival Samsung Electronics for the first time.