View of the SK hynix building. Photo courtesy of SK hynix
SK hynix (000660.KS) generated more than 17 trillion won from Nvidia (NVDA) in the first half of this year, accounting for about 13% of its total sales.
According to a semiannual report filed by SK hynix on the 14th, the company earned 17.6087 trillion won ($12.7 billion) in first-half sales from a “single external customer.” That customer is understood to be Nvidia, SK hynix’s largest client. The figure represents 13.35% of total sales.
The company also booked 17.1874 trillion won in sales from another single external customer. That customer was not named either, but is presumed to be a data center operator that procures large volumes of memory, such as Microsoft or Google.
The share marks a sharp decline from last year, when SK hynix earned 24% of its annual sales from Nvidia. The company has diversified its customer base toward other big tech firms that are developing their own AI chips, or application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), as an alternative to graphics processing units (GPUs). Nvidia’s share of sales is nonetheless expected to expand to some extent in the second half, as SK hynix concentrates supply of fourth-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM4) to coincide with the launch of Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin chip.
At a recent earnings conference call for the second quarter, SK hynix said it had “begun mass-production supply of HBM4 to major customers starting in the second quarter and completed sample supply of HBM4E to customers,” adding that it was “currently in talks with major customers on HBM supply volumes and prices for 2027.”
Sales that SK hynix earned in the United States, including from Nvidia, came to 84.5648 trillion won, or 64.1% of the total. Over the same period, sales in China reached 32.4783 trillion won, or 24.6% of the total. SK hynix is understood to sell mainly AI server products in the U.S. and mobile products such as low-power DRAM and NAND in China.