SK Hynix will invest 80 trillion won, or about $51.46 billion, to build a new NAND flash in Cheongju, South Korea, with production set to begin in the first half of 2029. CEO Kwak Noh-jung announced the plan at an event attended by Chairman Lee Jae Myung, integrating the new factory, called M17, into a broader effort by the two South Korean memory giants to meet demand that the industry is struggling to meet.
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The announcement follows Samsung's own $647 billion , unveiled a few days earlier for the same region of the country facing a chip shortage. The $51.46 billion covers the NAND factory alone.
SK Hynix ’s total spending commitment , when including a separate advanced packaging plant, rises to 100 trillion won, or about $64 billion. The second facility, known as P&T7 and also located in Cheongju, is for wafer-level packaging and is targeted for completion by 2027, two years ahead of the main plant. Reuters reported both figures, and Korean media confirmed the split between the two projects.
The M17 will be SK Hynix's fourth NAND fab and represents a bet that flash storage, long considered the least impressive part of the memory business compared to the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that power AI accelerators, still needs serious new capacity. NAND chips handle long-term data storage on solid-state drives, distinct from the DRAM and HBM used as working memory inside AI servers.
Industry observers, including TrendForce and DigiTimes, have noted a tightening of NAND supply as data center operators buy storage alongside compute power, even as most of the attention surrounding SK Hynix’s stock rally has focused on HBM. President Lee’s administration unveiled an investment plan worth somewhere between $520 billion and $576 billion, depending on which media outlet you use, on June 29, with Samsung and SK Hynix both committing to new factories and packaging lines across the Chungcheong region.
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Reuters and Nikkei Asia have linked the investment boom to warnings that a global memory shortage, driven largely by AI data center construction, could persist until 2027 rather than ease this year. That shortage has already affected consumer electronics. Memory prices have risen enough this year for Apple to discontinue its flagship Mac Mini, and DRAM buyers elsewhere have turned to alternative suppliers, including a reported shift by Corsair to DRAM made in China in some of its kits.
The scale of the response from SK Hynix and Samsung suggests that both expect the pressure to last well beyond the next product cycle. Construction of the M17 is expected to begin next year, giving SK Hynix about three years to bring the plant from start to production, a typical timeline for a facility of this size. Neither SK Hynix nor the South Korean government have detailed how the investment will be financed beyond the company’s own capital plans.
Cheongju, already home to SK Hynix's existing NAND operations, is becoming the center of gravity for the company's storage ambitions well into the next decade.
SK Hynix surpassed Samsung last year as South Korea’s most valuable listed company, a shift driven almost entirely by the boom in HBM rather than NAND, making this new bet on flash storage notable in its own right. NAND capacity additions rarely get the same attention as HBM supply deals, but the two product lines are increasingly competing for the same wafer starts and packaging capacity inside SK Hynix’s Korean factories.
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Executives at both companies have been candid that memory has become the bottleneck limiting how quickly the broader AI industry can grow.
