The SK Hynix Inc. logo is displayed on a glass door at the company’s office in Seoul, South Korea, on Monday, Jan. 27, 2014. SK Hynix aims to select a U.S. site for its advanced chip packaging plant and break ground there around the first quarter of next year.
SeongJoon Cho | Bloomberg | Getty Images
South Korea’s SK Hynix on Thursday posted record operating profit and revenue in the second quarter on sustained demand for its high bandwidth memory technology used in generative AI chipsets.
Here are SK Hynix’s second-quarter results compared with LSEG SmartEstimates, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:
- Revenue: 22.23 trillion won ($16.17 billion) vs. 20.56 trillion won
- Operating profit: 9.21 trillion won vs. 9 trillion won
Revenue rose over 35% in the June quarter compared with the same period a year earlier, while operating profit rose nearly 69%, year on year.
On a quarter-on-quarter basis, revenue rose 26%, while operating profit jumped 24%.
The company said in a statement that it enjoyed strong demand and favorable pricing conditions in the first half of the year. SK Hynix added that there was a low likelihood of sharp demand corrections for the rest of 2025, due to stable customer inventory levels and expected demand from new product launches.
SK Hynix is a leading supplier of dynamic random access memory — a type of semiconductor memory commonly found in PCs, workstations and servers that is used to store data and program code.
Much of the company’s recent success can be credited to its business in high bandwidth memory, or HBM — a type of DRAM used for artificial intelligence computing.
“Demand for AI memory continued to grow, driven by aggressive AI investments from big tech companies,” Song Hyun-jong, president and head of the Corporate Center at SK Hynix, said in the earnings call.
The company expects this investment to continue to drive healthy demand growth in the server market, despite macro uncertainty, with demand for general-purpose servers also expected to grow.
Further development of AI agents with enhanced reasoning models will necessitate more high-performance memory, according to Song, who added that the proliferation of AI in the PC and smartphone market will boost demand further.
“Additionally, ongoing investments by governments and corporations for solving AI are likely to become a new long term driver of AI memory demand,” Song said.
SK Hynix has established itself as the global leader in HBM, supplying clients such as U.S. AI darling Nvidia. The company expects to double HBM sales for the full year compared to 2024 — they contributed 77% to its second-quarter revenue.
The company said it expected its capital expenditure in 2025 to increase, with “proactive investment” needed to ensure support for its HBM customers in 2026.
In the first quarter, SK Hynix’s success in HBM had seen the company overtake rival Samsung Electronics in the global DRAM market for the first time, according to Counterpoint Research.
A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month estimated that SK Hynix had tied Samsung’s combined DRAM and NAND revenues in the second quarter, with both vying for the top position in the global memory market. NAND is a type of flash memory that is commonly used in storage devices.
Samsung and US.-based memory maker Micron Technology are both seeking to catch up to SK Hynix in the HBM space. However, analysts expect SK Hynix’s dominance to persist in the short-term.
“As of now, I believe SK Hynix still holds its leadership in the HBM race … despite Samsung’s and Micron’s catch‑up efforts,” said Ray Wang, research director of semiconductors, supply chain and emerging technology at The Futurum Group.
“I expect this edge to persist through the rest of 2025 and extend into 2026,” he added.