SK hynix sees 20-fold AI infrastructure growth

SK hynix projected Wednesday that the performance scale of AI infrastructure will grow roughly 20-fold by 2030, driven by rapidly rising demand for AI inference.

Ahn Hyun, head of development at the Korean chip giant, made the projection during his keynote speech at the 2026 Semiconductor Exhibition, which opened earlier in the day for a three-day run in southern Seoul.

Ahn said the AI inference market is expanding simultaneously in three areas — task complexity, the amount of information processed at a time and the volume of inference requests.

The interaction of the three factors is rapidly increasing demand for AI infrastructure, he said.

As demand for AI inference surges, memory is becoming increasingly important for storing and transferring large volumes of data.

In particular, the growing capacity requirements of key-value caches, which store and reuse information previously processed by AI models, are requiring data to be distributed across different types of memory, including high bandwidth memory (HBM), dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and solid-state drives.

SK hynix is pursuing next-generation memory technologies, including 3-D stacked DRAM and high bandwidth flash, while continuing to enhance the performance of existing HBM products, the executive added.

Yonhap