Illustration of the SK Hynix company logo seen displayed on a smartphone screen.
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South Korea’s SK Hynix on Thursday topped quarterly revenue and operating profit estimates, as demand for its high bandwidth memory offerings used in artificial intelligence chipsets stayed strong.
Here are SK Hynix’s first-quarter results versus LSEG SmartEstimates, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:
- Revenue: 17.64 trillion won ($12.36 billion) vs. 17.26 trillion won
- Operating profit: 7.44 trillion won vs. 6.62 trillion won
Revenue rose about 42% in the March quarter compared with the same period a year earlier, while operating profit surged 158%, year on year.
On a quarter-on-quarter basis, revenue dropped 11%, while operating profit fell 8% from a record high in the December quarter.
SK Hynix is a leading supplier of dynamic random access memory — a type of semiconductor memory found in PCs, workstations and servers that is used to store data and program code.
The company warned that macroeconomic uncertainties including U.S. tariff policy have created demand volatility that will impact the second half of the year.
“While reciprocal tariff measures between some countries are currently suspended, there are growing concerns that tariff can be applied to semiconductor products,” an SK Hynix executive said in a Thursday earnings call. The company expects a relatively limited impact from tariffs on its artificial intelligence server demand.
Meanwhile, demand from consumer electronics such as PCs and smartphones is expected to benefit from the launch of new products that feature AI functionalities this year.
In its earnings release, SK Hynix said that its first-quarter profits demonstrated AI’s impact in the memory market.
The memory chipmaker expects Big Tech’s spending on AI to continue, with the ecosystem’s expansion to be driven by open-source AI model offerings, and “sovereign AI projects” that will stoke memory demand.
“With development cost decreasing, initiatives for AI development have surged, which has led to a sharp increase in demand,” a company executive said.
SK Hynix cited DeepSeek’s open-source R1 reasoning model, which achieved competitive performance with limited hardware resources earlier this year, as an example of a catalyst for AI development.
The company has benefitted from a boom in AI servers as a key supplier of high bandwidth memory, or HBM — a type of DRAM used in artificial intelligence servers — to clients such as the U.S. AI darling Nvidia. Micron Technology and Samsung Electronics are the other players in the space.
A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month said that SK Hynix had captured 70% of the HBM market by revenue share in the first quarter.
This HBM dominance helped it overtake Samsung in the overall DRAM market for the first time ever, with a 36% global market share as compared to Samsung’s 34%, the report added.
“The announcement that our company ranked first in the DRAM market in Q1 2025 … reflects that our portfolio strategies that focused on highly profitable AI memory was well executed,” an SK Hynix representative said.
The company announced plans on Thursday to build a new fabrication facility in Cheongju, South Korea, that will expand its production of next-generation DRAM, including HBM.
Construction of the fab is expected to begin at the end of April with an aim to be completed for early mass production in November 2025. The company said its total investment in the new production base would be more than 20 trillion won over the long term.
Earlier this month, the South Korean government announced a 33 trillion won support package for its chips industry. This was higher than the 26 trillion it committed last year as the industry faces the uncertainty posed by Washington’s global trade tariffs.
SK Hynix shares fell 0.9% in Asia.
