SK hynix reported third-quarter revenue of 104.6 trillion won on 28 October, its first quarter ever above 100 trillion. Operating profit reached 83.3 trillion won, a margin of about 80%, and net profit 39.8 trillion. Compared with the previous quarter, revenue rose 32% and operating profit 38%. The company credits shipments of HBM4 memory for AI accelerators, DDR5 memory for servers and enterprise SSDs.

What it means: The result shows how much the memory market has changed: demand from AI data centres absorbs a large share of output, and manufacturers favour the products with the highest margins, such as HBM for accelerators. An operating margin close to 80% in a traditionally cyclical industry means supply is not keeping up with demand, and SK hynix expects this to last for years. The effect reaches people who never buy an accelerator: when production lines shift towards AI memory, prices rise for conventional DRAM and for the SSDs that go into servers, laptops and storage systems. Greek businesses planning to replace equipment or upgrade servers during 2027 would do well to request quotes earlier and budget for higher memory costs. The same applies to anyone paying for cloud services, since providers gradually pass hardware costs into their prices. For software vendors, optimising memory use becomes a cost question again, not only a performance one.

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