SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won on SK Hynix's massive memory expansion — full interview

Summary

CNBC's Katie Tarasov interviews SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won at SK Group headquarters in Seoul. Chey argues that AI and AI agents will drive enormous memory demand, justifying SK Hynix's $720 billion fab expansion and making HBM/memory a near-term AI bottleneck. He also discusses Nvidia's dominant AI ecosystem role, TSMC's critical base-die capacity, chipflation pressures on downstream hardware and autos, and how long-term customer agreements are meant to manage oversupply risk.

• Chey expects AI agents to grow tenfold in five years and memory volume to quintuple in ten years.
• SK Hynix is pursuing a $720 billion memory fab buildout and is SK Group's most important subsidiary.
• He describes next year as the worst memory shortage and says demand is growing twice this year.
• HBM consumes about four times the wafer capacity of normal DRAM, tightening memory supply.
• Nvidia is called the most important customer and dominant AI ecosystem leader.
• TSMC base-die capacity is described as a critical AI/HBM supply-chain link.
• Rising memory prices are creating chipflation and pressuring PC, smartphone, consumer electronics, and automaker costs.
• Long-term customer agreements and risk-sharing programs are intended to prevent oversupply or undersupply.