SK Hynix Caps Off Bumper Year With Record Quarter — Update

By Kwanwoo Jun

Nvidia supplier SK Hynix posted record earnings for the final quarter of 2025 as the global artificial-intelligence boom continued to fuel strong demand for memory chips, buoying profits for major manufacturers.

The world's second-largest memory chip maker supplies high-bandwidth-memory products to Nvidia, and surging demand for such chips, which are a crucial component of AI accelerators and have higher margins than conventional memory products, has been a major earnings driver for the company.

Net profit for the October-December period surged 90% from a year earlier to 15.246 trillion won, equivalent to $10.66 billion, the company said Wednesday. That topped the previous quarter's record of 12.598 trillion won and analysts' estimates of 13.989 trillion won in a FactSet consensus.

Revenue also hit a quarterly high, climbing 66% to 32.827 trillion won, while operating profit more than doubled to a record 19.170 trillion won.

For the full year, revenue rose 47% to 97.147 trillion won, with net profit more than doubling to 42.948 trillion won. Operating profit doubled to a record 47.206 trillion won, surpassing larger chip-making rival Samsung Electronics' estimated 43.530 trillion won for 2025.

SK Hynix said after the results that it will restructure its California-based subsidiary Solidigm to establish an AI company in the U.S. and commit $10 billion to the new business arm. The entity will "play a pivotal role in delivering optimized AI systems for its customers in the AI data-center sector," it said in a statement.

Investors have continued to pile into SK Hynix's stock on optimism about its leading position in the AI memory market, sending shares 5.1% higher on Wednesday ahead of the earnings report. The stock has risen nearly 30% year to date, after nearly quadrupling in 2025.

The share-price gains come as SK Hynix stands to be a major beneficiary of the AI frenzy driving powerful earnings growth at chip makers. Big global technology companies have continued to pour billions of dollars into building AI data centers that require a huge volume of advanced computing chips.

Amid surging demand for AI chips, the company earlier this month said it would build a $13 billion chip packaging plant in South Korea by the end of 2027 to expand its output capacity. It expects the global HBM market to grow an average 33% annually through 2030.

The memory market has entered a hyper-bull phase, eclipsing the historic 2018 industry boom, Counterpoint Research said.

"Supplier leverage is at an all-time high, driven by an insatiable demand for AI and server capacity," M.S. Hwang and Jeongku Choi of Counterpoint wrote in a recent note. Memory-chip prices rose an estimated 40%-50% in the fourth quarter and could rise a further 40%-50% in the first quarter and around 20% in the following quarter, they said.

Nomura expects the so-called memory supercycle to last until 2027. It said recently that demand for dynamic random-access memory products and high-bandwidth memory could remain robust through 2026, thanks to conventional servers and solid-state drives for AI and non-AI servers, resulting in memory clients starting proactive purchases.

HSBC analyst Ricky Seo projected an even longer cycle, saying the semiconductor upward trend could last four to five years.

Write to Kwanwoo Jun at kwanwoo.jun@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 28, 2026 05:46 ET (10:46 GMT)