Arya News - Chey Tae-won expects memory demand to far exceed supply through 2027 despite capacity expansion.
SEOUL – SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said the global shortage of AI memory chips is severe enough that foreign governments have started intervening on behalf of their own industries, and warned that Seoul is likely to face similar pressure.
He separately argued that SK hynix needs to accelerate capacity expansion at home and abroad, describing today’s memory prices as “abnormal” and warning that sustained high prices would invite new competitors and geopolitical retaliation.
“Building where we can, as fast as we can, has almost become the lifeline of Korea’s semiconductor industry,” Chey said at a press briefing on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Jeju Forum, which he chairs.
Chey said customers have asked SK hynix for 60 to 100 percent more AI memory in 2027 than this year. Given AI now accounts for more than half of overall semiconductor consumption, he put total demand growth at a minimum of 50 to 60 percent. Supply is not keeping pace. “No company has meaningful new capacity coming online next year,” he said.
The imbalance is most acute in high-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM that pairs with Nvidia’s AI accelerators. SK hynix held 58 percent of the global HBM market by revenue in the first quarter of 2026, according to Counterpoint Research, well ahead of Micron and Samsung at 21 percent each. Industry demand for HBM has repeatedly outpaced supplier guidance over the past two years.
That imbalance, Chey said, is now producing what he called “near-chaotic lobbying,” and not only from corporate customers. Foreign governments have begun treating memory access as a matter of “economic security.”
“Right now, companies absorb the pressure. Governments will start pressuring other governments soon.”
Chey framed SK hynix’s own expansion in different terms. Sustained high prices, he argued, would ultimately hurt Korean chipmakers themselves. They would push PC and smartphone makers into what he called “chipflation,” pull in new entrants attracted by the margins, and invite the kind of geopolitical retaliation other Asian exporters have faced before.
He cited Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s stated interest in chip manufacturing as an early sign of that pull.
“Prices have to normalize,” Chey said. “Otherwise, the market shrinks and competitors flood in.”
The company is already accelerating at home. SK hynix pulled the first clean room at its Yongin cluster forward to February 2027 from May and committed an additional 21.6 trillion won ($14.52 billion) in March of this year. It is also converting its Cheongju M15X plant into a dedicated DRAM base for high-bandwidth memory. A larger long-term expansion into the country’s southwest, jointly planned with Samsung Electronics, will be sited at the Gwangju military airfield.
On top of that, SK hynix is now reviewing candidate fab sites worldwide by speed, scale, and the readiness of power, water and land. US locations are under consideration, Chey said, examined on their own merits rather than as a concession to any particular US demand.
He was dismissive when asked specifically about US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s continued push for Korean chipmakers to invest stateside. Lutnick “has been this way” since the early Trump administration, Chey said. “The question is always the same: how much will you invest in the US, how much will you reshore. This time isn’t different.”
The company’s only confirmed US footprint remains a $3.87 billion HBM advanced packaging and R&D facility in Indiana announced in April 2024, which handles back-end work rather than wafer fabrication.