Descriptions:
SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won sat down with Bloomberg in an exclusive interview timed to SK Hynix’s landmark US listing — a $26.5 billion ADR offering that gives the South Korean memory giant direct access to American capital markets. The conversation explores why now is the right moment for this move, and how the AI era is fundamentally reshaping the memory chip business.
Chairman Chey makes a compelling structural argument for why AI demand differs from prior consumer electronics cycles: whereas smartphone and PC demand was capped by the number of human users, AI agents multiply memory requirements nonlinearly. Each person could eventually run hundreds of agents, each generating substantial KV cache that must be stored in high bandwidth memory (HBM). This dynamic, he argues, transforms HBM from a cyclical commodity into a sustained, compounding growth market — directly justifying SK Hynix’s aggressive capacity expansion.
Beyond memory chips, the chairman outlines SK Group’s broader AI stack ambitions: a roughly $1 trillion investment commitment over the next decade targeting approximately 15 gigawatts of AI data center capacity in Korea and 5 gigawatts internationally, alongside vertical expansion through SK Telecom into LLM development, robotics, and healthcare. The US ADR structure is also being positioned as a talent attraction mechanism for the chip industry, where skilled worker shortages in America present a persistent challenge. The interview offers rare direct insight into how one of the world’s dominant AI memory suppliers views both near-term supply tightness and the long-term demand trajectory.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Tech · Published July 10, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
