FLASH
SK Hynix is expanding production at its Solidigm Dalian site in China but restricting the NAND technology to the 100-layer class while using more advanced 375-layer class NAND at its Cheongju plant in South Korea.
Solidigm ships its 122.88 TB D5-P5336 SSD made with QLC 192-layer 3D-NAND, with the drive announced in November 2024. It has said it will ship a 245 TB SSD by the end of this year.
SK Hynix paid Intel $8.9 billion for its Solidigm NAND operation; $7 billion in late 2020 and c$1.9 billion in March 2025. In its most recent earnings SK Hynix made $64.6 billion profit, $41.63 billion minus Kioxia share sale receipts, which puts the Solidigm purchase into today’s memory market context.
By buying Solidigm, it gained Solidigm’s Dalian Plant 1 fab and began constructing Plant 2 in 2022. However, according to Korea’s SE Daily, construction was suspended due to then memory business downturn. President Trump’s drive to restrict supply of advanced US-controlled technology to China also played a role.
Now, with the memory business on a substantial AI demand-fuelled boom, construction has resumed. The building was completed in the first half of this year and equipment installation starts in November. NAND wafer production will begin in the first half of 2027, and scale up to about 50,000 wafers per month.
This is half the 100,000 wafers per month output of the Plant 1 fab. US tech export restrictions still apply and Dalian Plant 2 will use the same NAND technology as its Plant 1, meaning 100-layer class; sub-200 layers. SK Hynix views this as lower-cost, mature floating-gate technology and it’s reserving its advanced NAND technology, based on charge-trap flash, for the Cheongju fab.
This means that Solidigm is restricted to using its current 192-layer NAND for the coming 245 TB drive.
The Dalian plant is operated by SK hynix Semiconductor (Dalian) Co., a Chinese SK Hynix subsidiary, not Solidigm itself, meaning Solidigm is now a sales and marketing operation based in the US along with its Rancho Cordova R&D facility.
Restricting Dalian flash to sub-200 layers will limit its high-capacity SSD capability as we get 245 TB and greater drives. Solidigm can get more density from its192-layer tech by shrinking cell sizes and string stacking, but it will be chasing 375-layer technology with intrinsic capacity advantages. It entered the AI computer vision software market in March. SK Hynix was then setting up AI Co in the USA, which would own Solidigm. Possible new product directions will be emerging from this.