SK Hynix posts record year as HBM boom supercharges profits

SK Hynix revenues for the final 2025 quarter rose 63.3 percent year-on-year to ₩32.83 trillion ($22.93 billion) with net profit of ₩15.25 trillion ($10.65 billion), up 90.4 percent year-on-year. That profit is greater than any of its individual quarterly revenues in 2023 and represents 46.4 percent of its revenues.

The full 2025 numbers are also high, with revenues of ₩97.15 trillion ($67.87 billion) and profits of ₩42.95 trillion ($30.00 billion). That profit number is larger than SK Hynix’s entire 2023 revenue of ₩32.8 trillion ($22.91 billion). These are all-time high annual and quarterly results, and it’s high-bandwidth memory (HBM) demand that’s causing this increase in the Korean company’s finances.

The company said “growth momentum accelerated further in the fourth quarter. In addition to HBM, demand on conventional memory solutions for servers increased sharply.” It’s all down to AI, and especially AI training, using GPUs that must have HBM to sustain their data processing speeds.

It also said the large-scale production of HBM4 “has been underway to meet customer requests.” It is also developing custom HBM technology, designed to fit individual customer needs. This indicates that buyer aversion to single-source supply contracts is being overcome by the need to obtain the greatest HBM performance they can for their own products.

SK Hynix makes DRAM, HBM, NAND and SSDs. HBM revenue more than doubled year-on-year, “making a significant contribution to the company’s record performance.” In the NAND area, SK Hynix also achieved the highest annual revenue on record, responding to customer demand centered on eSSD in the second half of 2025, despite a sluggish first half.

Its DRAM technology is transiting to a 1c nm process, and the company is expanding its SOCAMM2 and GDDR7 product ranges. NAND production is migrating to 321-layer 3D technology, and it says it’s “actively addressing AI data center storage demand by leveraging subsidiary Solidigm’s QLC eSSD, which uses older, 192-layer technology. Solidigm is developing 200-plus-layer 3D NAND technology that may surface later this year.

The company has ongoing memory fabrication capacity and chip packaging capability increases to meet the continued strong demand levels it’s seeing. Construction of advanced packaging facilities in Cheongju, Korea, and Indiana, USA, are in progress. A new memory fab is being built in the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster in Korea.

With all the money flowing in, SK Hynix announced a large-scale shareholder return program to enhance shareholder value, with enhanced dividends.

For the future, SK Hynix said it’s looking to “sustain growth and enhance shareholder value based on the company’s technological prowess.” It sees a positive future, noting that, “as the AI market shifts from training to inference while demand for distributed architectures expands, the role of memory will become increasingly critical. Accordingly, not only demand for high-performance memory such as HBM is expected to grow continuously, but also for overall memory products including server DRAM and NAND as well.”

Song Hyun Jong, President and Head of Corporate Center, said: “We will strengthen our role not merely as a product supplier, but as a core infrastructure partner in the AI era, enabling customers to meet their AI performance requirements.” This is a nod to the setting up of AI Co. in the USA, with a $10 billion capital budget to invest in partnerships with US AI-focused businesses.