South Korea’s SK Hynix (000660.KS), opens new tab, the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker, said on Thursday that some customers have brought forward orders in preparation for new U.S. tariffs on semiconductors.
Speaking at the company’s annual shareholder meeting, SK Hynix’s Head of Global Sales and Marketing, Lee Sang-rak, said the “pull-in” effects, along with the reduction in customers’ inventory, led to favourable market conditions recently.
But he added it remains to be seen whether the trend will continue.
In January, SK Hynix had said its shipments of DRAM and NAND flash memory chips would decline by between 10% and 20% in the first quarter of this year from the previous quarter.
U.S. chipmaker Micron (MU.O), opens new tab, SanDisk (SNDK.O), opens new tab and China’s YMTC have recently raised their memory chip prices, partly due to robust demand from the AI market, according to media reports.
Micron, SanDisk and YMTC were not immediately available for comment when contacted by Reuters.
U.S. President Donald Trump said in February he intends to impose tariffs on imports of semiconductors and some other products “in the neighborhood of 25%”.
“Fears that the U.S. may impose semiconductor tariffs in April have led to preemptive transfers of semiconductor inventory to the United States,” Nomura said in a report this week.
“It is not yet known if the tariffs will actually be imposed; if this materialises, it could lead to higher prices for set products, which could dampen demand,” it added.
SK Hynix, a key supplier to AI chip leader Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab, expects “explosive growth” in high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips demand this year, backed by investments in data centres, CEO Kwak Noh-Jung told shareholders.
In January, SK Hynix forecast sales of its HBM chips would more than double this year.
“Our HBM sales for 2025 have already been sold out, and we plan to finalise sales with customers for the 2026 volume within the first half of this year to further strengthen revenue stability,” said Kwak.
While doubts around a slowdown in spending on AI hardware emerged in January following Chinese startup DeepSeek’s claims that it had developed AI models rivaling Western counterparts at a fraction of cost, Nvidia last month signalled that its AI chip demand was intact.
Kwak saw DeepSeek’s emergence as ultimately beneficial to SK Hynix.
“This could likely have a positive impact on medium-to-long-term demand for AI memory chips. From our perspective, we don’t see DeepSeek slowing down demand for high-performance accelerators or HBM,” said Kwak.
By Heekyong Yang and Hyunjoo Jin
