SK hynix held a groundbreaking ceremony on August 27, 2026, at Purdue University’s Holloway Gymnasium in West Lafayette, Indiana, for its first U.S. high-bandwidth memory production base. The company said it expects to invest more than $4 billion, open the cleanroom by October 2028, and start mass production of next-generation HBM in the second half of 2029.

Wafers will still be made in Korea, then shipped to Indiana for advanced packaging and testing before they go to U.S. customers as Made in USA products. SK hynix also posted the announcement on its newsroom. An advanced packaging R&D testbed is planned next to the production lines so customers, universities, and suppliers can build prototypes on site.

Jobs, Purdue, and a Korea-U.S. loop

The plant is expected to employ about 1,000 people in commercial operation. SK hynix said more than 100 materials, components, and equipment firms are under review as suppliers, and it projected about 7,000 direct and indirect jobs during construction and later operations. At the ceremony it signed a research memorandum with Purdue on system integration and advanced packaging, including HBM.

Indiana Governor Mike Braun, U.S. Senator Todd Young, Purdue President Mitch Daniels, and South Korea’s ambassador to the United States, Kang Kyung-wha, attended. SK Group also said it will hire through a U.S. Forces Korea veterans job platform run with the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

“Today marks the day when the United States and SK hynix embark on a new future of AI together.” Kwak Noh-Jung, CEO, SK hynix

Senator Young tied the project to the CHIPS and Science Act and to rebuilding U.S. semiconductor capacity. Kang called it the first AI memory production facility and R&D center of its kind in the United States, not only a factory investment.

Decoded Take

A groundbreaking in Indiana does not loosen the HBM market this year. 2029 production, with front-end still in Korea, means U.S. customers get a packaging and political story long before they get a new supply curve. That is still a real shift. Memory has been the tightest input in the GPU buildout, and SK hynix is putting a U.S. flag on the last step of the stack that hyperscalers care about for procurement and security reviews. The Purdue testbed is the nearer signal. If customers actually tape out packages there before the cleanroom opens, Indiana becomes a design node, not a ribbon-cutting. Watch the October 2028 cleanroom date and whether the first qualified product is HBM4E or whatever generation the 2029 racks actually require.