SEOUL, July 24 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's chipmaker SK hynix logged its record-high earnings in the second quarter due to solid sales of memory chips used in generative artificial intelligence (AI) chipsets, the company said Thursday.
Its revenue surged 35.4 percent over the year to 22.23 trillion won (16.2 billion U.S. dollars) in the April-June quarter.
Operating profit soared 68.5 percent to 9.21 trillion won (6.7 billion dollars), and net income spiked 69.8 percent to 7 trillion won (5.1 billion dollars) in the second quarter.
Both revenue and operating profit hit all-time highs in the company's history, surpassing previous highs in the fourth quarter of last year.
The company said aggressive investment by global big-tech firms into AI led to a steady increase in demand for AI memory chips, noting that shipment of both DRAM and NAND flash memory chips was higher than expected.
SK hynix forecasted that growing competition among big-tech firms to enhance inference of AI models would lead to higher demand for high-performance and high-capacity memory products, adding that investment by countries to build sovereign AI would also help generate long-term demand for memory.
Sovereign AI refers to a country's ability to build an independent AI system with its own infrastructure, data, talent and business network. ■
