WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana — South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix said on Thursday it plans to begin volume production of its next-generation HBM4E chips at its Indiana facility in the third quarter of 2029, and expects the site to eventually reach annual capacity of hundreds of thousands of wafers. The more than $4 billion project marks a major expansion of SK Hynix’s U.S. operations as surging investment in artificial intelligence drives demand for high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. The chipmaker seeks to bring production closer to major customers including Nvidia, Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google. By 2030, the company expects Indiana to become a key HBM production base in the United States. The facility, at the Purdue Research Park in West Lafayette, is scheduled to begin cleanroom operations in the second half of 2028, Chief Executive Kwak Noh-Jung said. A cleanroom is a highly controlled manufacturing space that keeps dust and other microscopic contaminants out during the chipmaking process. The site will house a next-generation HBM packaging line as well as an AI semiconductor research and d
