Chey Tae-won says HBM demand growing 'exponentially,' SK Group to invest tens of billions in AI

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said the spread of artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping the memory chip market — shifting it away from the boom-and-bust cycles of the past and into a prolonged period of structurally driven demand.

Chey made the remarks Friday (local time) on the first day of SK hynix's Nasdaq listing, speaking in interviews with CNBC and Bloomberg TV as well as at a press briefing in New York. He called the Nasdaq debut "a historic moment," saying SK Group acquired Hynix 15 years ago as something of a dream — and that dream has now become reality.

Chey expressed strong confidence in memory demand in the AI era. He said demand for memory chips, including high-bandwidth memory (HBM), is rising rapidly and that he has "a certain level of conviction that demand will continue to grow." He added that customers are asking for more supply even as the company expands its production capacity.

"We announced plans to double our production capacity within the next five years, and every single customer says, 'That's not enough — we need more,'" he said. Surging investment in AI data centers and growing use of generative AI are structurally expanding memory demand.

Chey said the semiconductor industry is behaving differently from the past. "I believe a clear structural change has already taken place," he said. "It has become clear that the market is no longer moving in the same oversupply cycle as before." He acknowledged that cyclicality has not disappeared entirely, but said demand is currently growing far faster than supply can keep up.

He also stressed that the supply shortage will not be easy to resolve quickly. Building semiconductor factories and ramping up wafer production takes considerable time, and infrastructure constraints — power, water and land — add further limits. "For the time being, the pace of demand growth far exceeds the pace at which we can build factories and increase supply," Chey said.

He offered an analogy for where AI stands today. "The AI we are dealing with right now is barely at the level of a four- or five-year-old child," he said. "Just as a growing child needs to remember and store more and more information, the more AI evolves, the more memory demand will structurally have to increase." As AI progresses toward artificial general intelligence, the volume of training data and applications will grow, driving ever-greater demand for the memory needed to store and process it all.

Chey also highlighted the structural link between growing generative AI usage and memory demand. For AI to sustain long conversations or generate complex responses, it must store and retrieve previous exchanges and computation results — a process that requires large volumes of high-performance memory. As AI services multiply and usage time lengthens, demand for HBM and other memory chips will inevitably rise alongside them.

Chey outlined SK Group's broader AI investment plans, saying the group is considering large-scale investments across AI, AI data centers, related technologies and startups. He put the expected investment at "tens of billions of dollars," signaling an intent to expand well beyond memory manufacturing into the broader AI ecosystem.

He also said SK hynix's business direction will extend beyond simple memory manufacturing. Chey laid out a vision for developing SK hynix into a "memory service provider" — moving past selling commodity memory to designing customized stacks for individual customers and markets and delivering optimized memory systems.

Chey also left the door open to further investment in the United States. SK hynix is already pursuing a $4 billion advanced packaging factory in Indiana. Asked whether the company is considering building a semiconductor fab elsewhere in the US, he said "our team is currently reviewing that," but drew a line at interpreting the word "reviewing" as a commitment to build.

On factory location, he said conditions such as power supply, ultrapure water and large available land are what matter most. "Whether it's the US or any other country in the world, as long as those conditions are met, it doesn't matter to us," he said. He also stressed that expanding US investment would not come at the expense of investment in Korea.

On the threat from Chinese competitors, Chey sounded a note of caution. He said the favorable environment created by AI market expansion applies to Chinese companies just as much as to Korean ones, and that the pace of competition will accelerate. He said speed is what matters in the AI era, and that technology development and investment must move far faster than in the past.

On the benefits of the Nasdaq listing, Chey emphasized access to global capital markets and the ability to attract talent. He said the ADR listing would help SK hynix secure global investors and financial partners, and that US-style stock options could be used to recruit overseas talent.

Asked about the possibility of a stock split following the recent run-up in share price, Chey left room for the idea. "If more requests come in, we can certainly consider it," he said of a potential split to improve retail investor access, though he added that he has not yet received a formal proposal from the company's chief financial officer.

Chey pushed back on talk of an AI bubble. "In the stock market, one might say there is an 'AI bubble,'" he said. "But the AI technology itself is real." His point was that regardless of any short-term market froth, AI's technological transformation is clearly reshaping the demand structure of the memory industry.

SK hynix closed its first day of Nasdaq trading above its offering price, confirming strong interest from US investors. Chey's remarks carried a broader message: that SK hynix intends to use this listing as a springboard to be revalued not merely as an HBM supplier, but as a core player in AI infrastructure.