By Heekyong Yang and Kenneth Li
SEOUL/NEW YORK, July 10 (Reuters) – SK Hynix Chief Executive Kwak Noh-jung said the global memory industry is heading for its worst-ever supply shortage in 2027, forecasting that demand for memory will continue to exceed the company’s ability to produce it well into the next decade despite aggressive capacity expansion.
“We forecast that next year will be the worst year in the industry’s history from the supply perspective,” Kwak told Reuters in an interview on Friday, the day the South Korean memory chipmaker began trading on the Nasdaq.
“Our customer demand continues to go up, while our capacity has limitations,” he said. “We still forecast that customer demand will remain higher than our supply capacity even beyond 2030. But we are doing our best to solve the problem.”
Kwak’s comments follow a stellar debut for the South Korean chipmaker which has become a pivotal company in the AI supply chain by taking the lead in the development of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in Nvidia chipsets.
Shares of SK Hynix ADRs were up 14.8% at $170.94 on the Nasdaq on Friday afternoon.
(Reporting by Heekyong Yang in Seoul; Additional reporting by Johann M Cherian and Ragini Mathur in Bengaluru; Editing by Edwina Gibbs, Kenneth Li and Matthew Lewis)
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