SK Hynix is ready to supply its next-gen HBM4 memory chip.

The South Korean chip manufacturer announced on Friday that development and preparation for the mass production of the chip had been finished.

Head of HBM development Joohwan Cho said: “By supplying the product that meets customer needs in performance, power efficiency, and reliability in a timely manner, the company will fulfill time to market and maintain competitive position.”

HBM4 is the sixth generation of high-bandwidth memory chips, and SK Hynix states it has “the industry’s best data processing speed and power efficiency with the bandwidth doubled…and power efficiency improved by more than 40 percent.

“The company expects to improve AI service performance by up to 69 percent when the product is applied.”

HBM can provide faster processing speeds and reduced power consumption compared to traditional memory chips, making them critical for AI systems.

SK Hynix is the primary supplier of HBM chips to Nvidia, and HBM4 is expected to form part of the GPU maker’s new Rubin architecture, which is set to debut in the latter half of 2026.

The chip manufacturer recently posted record earnings for Q2 2025. Its quarterly revenue – 22.2 trillion won ($16.1 billion) – showed a 35 percent year-on-year (YoY) increase and a 26 percent quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) increase, while quarterly operating profit totaled 9.2 trillion won ($6.7bn), up 68 percent YoY and 24 percent from Q1.

Samsung, a major competitor of SK Hynix, has struggled to maintain pace. Although its memory chip business saw an 11 percent QoQ increase in Q2 2025, overall, operating profit for its chip division fell 94 percent YoY, down from 6.45 trillion won ($4.6bn) in Q2 2024 to 400bn won ($308 million).

SK Hynix is part of SK Group, one of South Korea’s most prominent conglomerates. On September 1, its telco unit SK Telecom, its construction unit SK Ecoplant, and AWS broke ground on a data center in the southeastern city of Ulsan.

In April 2024, TSMC signed an MoU with SK Hynix, the latter adopting the former’s advanced logic processes to develop HBM4.

The two companies also agreed to improve the integration of SK Hynix’s HBM with TSMC’s CoWoS (Chip on Wafer on Substrate), a proprietary packaging process that connects GPU, a logic chip, and HBM, on a special substrate called an interposer.