By Heekyong Yang and Joyce Lee
SEOUL (Reuters) -South Korea's SK Hynix posted on Thursday a record quarterly profit, driven by strong demand for advanced chips used in generative artificial intelligence chipsets and as some customers stockpiled semiconductors ahead of potential U.S. tariffs.
"SK Hynix foresees that increasing competition among big tech companies to enhance inference of AI models would lead to higher demand for high-performance and high-capacity memory products," it said in a statement.
The Nvidia supplier expects to double high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chip sales for the full year compared to 2024, the company said.
SK Hynix overtook Samsung Electronics as the world's top memory chip maker in the first quarter due to its leadership in HBM chips, a crucial component of AI chipsets designed by the likes of Nvidia that assist the processing of vast amounts of data to train AI models.
SK Hynix reported a 9.2 trillion won ($6.69 billion) operating profit for the April-June period, up 69% from 5.5 trillion won a year earlier.
That compared with a 9.0 trillion won average forecast by LSEG SmartEstimate, which is weighted toward analysts who are more consistently accurate. Revenue rose 35% to 22.2 trillion won during the quarter.
After posting a series of record profits boosted by strong AI demand, SK Hynix is bracing for potential U.S. tariffs and rising competition from rivals in supplying advanced chips to Nvidia, analysts say.
($1 = 1,374.5800 won)
(Reporting by Heekyong Yang and Joyce Lee and Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Leslie Adler and Jamie Freed)
