SK hynix's headquarters in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province / Yonhap

SK hynix on Thursday posted an operating profit of 37.61 trillion won ($25.42 billion) for the first quarter, nearly doubling its previous record set just three months earlier. This helped the chipmaker’s operating margin surpass 70 percent, far outpacing those of TSMC and Nvidia.

In its regulatory filing, the chipmaker said its sales stood at 52.58 trillion won and operating profit hit 37.61 trillion won during the January-March period, up respectively 198.1 percent and 405.5 percent from a year earlier.

The company's operating margin stood at 72 percent, surpassing the 58 percent posted by Taiwan’s TSMC in the first quarter and 65 percent recorded by Nvidia in the fourth quarter of last year. The two companies are widely considered the industry benchmark for profitability.

This marks a new quarterly earnings record for SK hynix, surpassing its previous all-time high set in the fourth quarter of last year — 32.83 trillion won in sales and 19.17 trillion won in operating profit.

“A seasonal slowdown is typically seen in the first quarter, but demand remained strong amid expanding investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure,” the company said.

“Expanded sales of high value-added products such as high-bandwidth memory (HBM), high-capacity server DRAM modules and enterprise solid state drives (eSSDs) drove earnings growth.”

SK hynix's 192GB small outline compression attached memory module 2 / Courtesy of SK hynix

The earnings record came amid an exponential expansion in AI infrastructure worldwide, which has fueled surging demand for AI-specific memory chips such as HBM. As memory chip makers concentrated production capacity on HBM, supply bottlenecks also emerged in conventional DRAM and even NAND flash products used for storage.

The company said demand has broadened beyond HBM into conventional DRAM and NAND more recently, as AI evolves from large-model training toward agentic AI, which requires repeated real-time inference across a wider range of service environments.

Source: Korea Times News