Rumor has it that SK Hynix (SKHY.US) plans to spend tens of trillion won to build a factory in Japan, or pioneer Korean semiconductor investment in Japan

The Zhitong Finance App learned that according to foreign media reports quoting industry sources on Friday, SK Hynix (SKHY.US) is considering building a memory chip production facility in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. The investment scale of the project may reach tens of trillion won.

According to the report, SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won recently visited the region — the area has been designated by the Japanese government as one of the semiconductor industry clusters. The region is tied with Kyushu and Hokkaido, and has been designated by the Japanese government as one of the three core bases of the semiconductor industry. According to people familiar with the matter, SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won recently personally visited the region.

SK Hynix's move is aimed at further expanding production capacity in response to the continued strengthening of global demand for memory chips. Judging from the volume of investment, the scale of tens of trillions of won is huge, but compared to SK Hynix's investment of millions of won in semiconductor industry clusters in Yongin and Hunan in mainland Korea, the production scale of the Miyagi plant is expected to be relatively small. According to industry analysts, the plant will be positioned as a new overseas production base for SK Hynix, complementing Korea's local industrial cluster.

If the plan is finally implemented, it will be the first large-scale semiconductor manufacturing investment made by a Korean chipmaker in Japan. In response to the above report, SK Hynix responded that no final decision has been made, but stated that “any site with the necessary infrastructure conditions may become a candidate site.”

It is worth noting that if the plan is successfully implemented, SK Hynix will become the third overseas company to operate a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Japan after Micron Technology of the United States and Taiwan's TSMC. In contrast, South Korea's other storage giant Samsung Electronics currently only has a next-generation semiconductor packaging R&D center in Yokohama, Japan.