Korea Cycle Data

  A routine Korea-Japan chamber of commerce meeting in Sendai drew an unusual crowd on August 31. The Korean chamber's chairman is Chey Tae-won, who also chairs SK Group, and ten days earlier Hankyoreh had reported that SK hynix was weighing a memory fab in Miyagi prefecture. Nikkei's same-day report laid out the setup: Miyagi has offered a 300,000 square meter site and has been in quiet contact, but the biggest obstacle is Seoul's concern about technology leakage. This post uses the Nikkei piece as a starting point to map how three governments see one fab differently, and checks where SK hynix's ability to fund it comes from, using the Q2 results Nikkei's own chart was pointing to. Chairman remarks, governor remarks and regulatory filings are kept separate. KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. Miyagi has offered a 300,000 m² site in the Second Sendai North industrial park with water and power in place (Nikkei). In Sendai on August 31, Chey said SK is "reviewing various candidate ...

  A UBS chart titled "Adjusted HBM supply vs demand" is making the rounds with the tagline that 2027 will be a brutal year for HBM. Six bars, three years. Read against the gridlines, the chart says something more specific than "shortage": 2027 is the first year in which end-consumption alone exceeds bit shipments, before any inventory is counted. This post converts the bar heights into numbers, works out what the red inventory box means, and fills in from public sources why consumption jumps and supply does not keep pace. Every figure from the chart is a read-off, and the post says so where it matters. KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. Read from the chart, HBM bit shipments run 21.4 / 36.6 / 53.6 billion Gb for 2025-2027E and end-consumption 17.6 / 26.1 / 59.7. In 2027 consumption alone is 6.1 billion Gb above shipments. 2. Adding the demand-side inventory box takes 2027 total demand to 76.4 billion Gb, a 43% shortfall against shipments. Through 2026 supply exceeded total demand (+2...

  You have probably seen the headline: legacy DDR4 now costs more than newer DDR5 . Then you open a price comparison site to actually buy a stick, and the tags are the other way round. DDR5 is far more expensive. Both numbers are real. They are just measuring different things , and the distance between them says something about how strange this memory market has become. KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. On July 1, 2026, spot quotes put a DDR4 16Gb die at $74.63 against $46.83 for DDR5 16Gb — DDR4 59% higher . 2. That same month, Korean retail averaged about $151 for a DDR4 16GB module and $244 for a DDR5 16GB module — DDR5 61% higher . 3. Different units (one die vs one module) and different markets (spot vs retail). The two figures cannot be converted into each other , and reporting that treats a "16Gb" quote as a module price is off by a factor of eight. Same month. Opposite conclusions. Two numbers, both true Start with the chip. On DRAMeXchange spot on July 1, 2026 , the DDR4 16Gb...

  Herald Business reported exclusively on August 31 that SK hynix is weighing Intel Foundry, alongside TSMC, for the base die of its seventh-generation HBM4E. The base die was made in-house through HBM3E, moved to TSMC 12nm for HBM4, and was headed for TSMC 3nm in HBM4E. Adding Intel would make it the first dual-sourced base die among the three memory makers. This post separates what the report establishes from what it implies, then looks at why the base die became the candidate for dual sourcing through three lenses: cost, supply chain, and packaging. It follows two earlier posts, on Samsung's 4nm base die roadmap and on SK hynix's HBM4 base-die requalification. KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. Per the report, SK hynix is reviewing a multi-vendor setup that splits HBM4E base dies between TSMC and Intel Foundry. Combined with the Intel EMIB packaging tests it disclosed at Hot Chips, both the base die and the package would move from TSMC-only to a dual track. 2. The driver is cost. Industry est...

  Across all 192 pages of CXMT's H1 2026 interim report, the string "HBM" appears zero times. The Chinese equivalent, 高带宽内存, appears zero times too. Meanwhile the sell-side numbers in circulation have CXMT shipping 125 million GB of HBM in 2026 and 1,179 million by 2028 — a 207% CAGR. This post measures the gap rather than picking a side. A follow-on to the three-part series on CXMT's H1 2026 interim report. KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. The filing mentions HBM zero times , and the July IPO prospectus contains no dedicated HBM project. The forecast has HBM growing at +207% a year through 2028. 2. Delivering that volume means allocating 23.5% of total DRAM wafer capacity to HBM by 2027 . That is not a change a company makes quietly. 3. So the conclusion is not "the forecast is wrong." It is that the forecast dictates what has to appear in the next few filings for it to hold. Forecast volumes against the company's own disclosure. Two documents of different kinds ...