Memory chipmaker SK Hynix has announced plans to invest $12.9 billion in a new advanced packaging plant in Cheongju, South Korea.

Named P&T7, the company said the facility will help it to meet the growing demand for AI memory products, including HBM (high-bandwidth memory).

Construction is scheduled to begin in April 2026 and is expected to be completed by the end of 2027. Cheongju is already home to SK Hynix’s M15 fab, and construction of its M15X facility is also currently underway in the region, with the latter currently progressing ahead of schedule, the company said.

“Through its investment in Cheongju P&T7, SK Hynix aims to go beyond short-term efficiency and profit/loss measures and contribute to strengthening the national industrial foundation in the mid- to long-term and creating a structure where the metropolitan area and regional regions can grow together,” the company said in a statement.

The news follows previous reports that SK Hynix and its domestic competitor Samsung are planning to increase investment and production capacity in order to meet growing demand from AI customers.

These pledges sit against a backdrop of storage and memory hardware shortages, with the size and scale of many recently announced AI data center build-outs having seemingly caught the market off guard and resulting in a capacity crunch, which some are forecasting could last up to two years.

In October 2025, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix struck a deal with OpenAI, which saw the three companies sign a letter of intent for the eventual supply of 900,000 DRAM wafers a month in order to meet the memory demands of its Stargate project.

No timeline has been given for when that demand is expected to be met. As part of that same agreement, SK Hynix said its SK Telecom unit had also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with OpenAI to develop a Stargate AI data center in the southwest region of South Korea.