Construction of $106B SK hynix Mega Fab Site Moving Along, But At Slower Pace
by Anton Shilov on March 23, 2024 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Memory
- DRAM
- 3D NAND
- Semiconductors
- SK Hynix
When a major industry slowdown occurs, big companies tend to slowdown their mid-term and long-term capacity related investments. This is exactly what happened to SK hynix's Yongin Semiconductor Cluster, a major project announced in April 2021 and valued at $106 billion. While development of the site has been largely completed, only 35% of the initial shell building has been constructed, according to the Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy.
"Approximately 35% of Fab 1 has been completed so far and site renovation is in smooth progress," a statement by the Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy reads. "By 2046, over KRW 120 trillion ($90 billion today, $106 billion in 2021) in investment will be poured to complete Fabs 1 through 4, and construction of Fab 1's production line will commence in March next year. Once completed, the infrastructure will rank as the world's largest three-story fab."
The new semiconductor fabrication cluster by SK hynix announced almost exactly three years ago is primarily meant to be used to make DRAM for PCs, mobile devices, and servers using advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) process technologies. The cluster, located near Yongin, South Korea, is intended to consist of four large fabs situated on a 4.15 million m2 site. With a planned capacity of approximately 800,000 wafer starts per month (WSPMs), it is set to be one of the world's largest semiconductor production hubs.
With that said, SK hynix's construction progress has been slower than the company first projected. The first fab in the complex was originally meant to come online in 2025, with construction starting in the fourth quarter of 2021. However, SK hynix began to cut its capital expenditures in the second half of 2022, and the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster project fell a victim of that cut. To be sure, the site continues to be developed, just at a slower pace; which is why some 35% of the first fab shell has been built at this point.
If completed as planned in 2021, the first phase of SK hynix Yongin operations would have been a major memory production facility costing $25 billion, equipped with EUV tools, and capable of 200,000-WSPM, according to reports from 2021.
Sources: Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy; ComputerBase
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PeachNCream - Saturday, March 23, 2024 - link
Notice how the vehicle on the roads have very poor relative scaling with each other despite the terrain between not indicating a significant enough drop via slope or providing other visual cues like changes in tree size that would help someone looking at the image get a sense of distance that justifies the much smaller freight vehicle. That's almost as shoddy as the fake images of race cars and dragons that some companies use as simulated images for display panels.DougMcC - Saturday, March 23, 2024 - link
Nah that strip of grass between the lower right vehicle and the next one in is a couple of miles wide. I invite you to think about just how big that fab really is!Threska - Saturday, March 23, 2024 - link
Toyota plant in KY. Big for the time.PeachNCream - Sunday, March 24, 2024 - link
The scale of vehicles alongside the Fab imply less than miles of distance because they are not miles-of-distance smaller than the two departing the Fab. The implication here is the photo editing work done simply doesn't account well for distances. I wonder if SK Hynix is using that image repeatedly as this isn't the first time I've seen it here on AT or if its just AT using the same one repeatedly to fill in the required image-in-article box at the top of a Pipeline story.zebrax2 - Saturday, March 23, 2024 - link
The lower right vehicle is on an elevated highway from the looks of it. The side wall of the highway was cut away as leaving it there would essentially cover 1/4 of the imageRedGreenBlue - Tuesday, April 9, 2024 - link
It’s just a reused photo, (also as someone else said, obviously an elevated highway) notice their statement that it’ll be the largest 3-story fab in the world. That photo is of a different building that’s 9 or 10 stories.lemurbutton - Sunday, March 24, 2024 - link
The world is about to enter a period in which memory, specifically, high bandwidth memory is going to be in a never ending supply constraint. I think SK Hynix would see this and put money back into the project to accelerate the plants.Blastdoor - Tuesday, March 26, 2024 - link
A constraint on the arrival of the memory constraint could be an electricity constraint.Maybe a few million solar panels and a couple dozen nuclear plants need to be built before completing this gigantic facility.