SK Group Chair Chey Tae-won visited Taiwan this week to strengthen partnerships with TSMC and other key players in the semiconductor and IT industries, accompanied by SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung.
According to industry sources on Friday, Chey departed for Taiwan on Wednesday and held a closed-door meeting with executives of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. His visit comes ahead of SK hynix’s planned mass production of its next-generation AI memory chip, HBM4, which incorporates TSMC’s base die.
During the trip, Chey also visited several major Taiwanese tech companies, including Asus and Wistron.
The SK chief last visited Taiwan in June last year. At that time, he met with TSMC Chair C.C. Wei in Taipei, proposing collaboration to “lay the foundation for an era of artificial intelligence that benefits humanity.”
SK hynix, the memory chip affiliate of SK Group, surpassed larger rival Samsung Electronics in the global DRAM market for the first time during the January–March period this year, becoming the world’s top DRAM supplier by revenue.
SK hynix accounted for 36 percent of the global DRAM market, ahead of Samsung’s 34 percent and Micron Technology’s 25 percent, according to market tracker Counterpoint Research.
The company’s strong performance is largely attributed to its early lead in HBM chips and its key supplier role to Nvidia, the world’s top maker of graphics processing units and the largest consumer for high-bandwidth memory.
With SK hynix’s upcoming HBM4 chips incorporating TSMC’s logic base die, its partnership with the Taiwanese contract chipmaker is critical.
SK hynix will also participate in a technology symposium hosted by TSMC in Santa Clara, California, where it plans to showcase its latest HBM4 and advanced packaging technologies. The Korean chipmaker also attended last year’s event, where it introduced its fifth-generation HBM3E.
By Jo He-rim (herim@heraldcorp.com)
