South Korea chip exports to Taiwan surge 225% year-over-year, SK hynix HBM memory is king

South Korea's memory chip exports to Taiwan surged over 225% year-over-year, thanks to the unstoppable demand of AI GPUs and AI accelerators and their respective HBM memory chips.

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In a new report from the Korea Times, we're learning that outbound shipments of HBM memory chips to Taiwan reached $4.26 billion in the first 6 months of this year, up an incredible 225.7% from a year ago, "far outperforming" South Korea's overall increase of memory chip exports at 88.7%, according to data compiled by the industry ministry and the Korea International Trade Association.

Taiwan was the third-largest importer of South Korean memory chips in the period, pushing out both Vietnam and the United States. Market watchers said that the huge surge in memory chip exports to Taiwan is thanks to SK hynix's fantastic HBM supply to NVIDIA, which uses its HBM memory inside of its AI GPUs, and fabs its chips over at TSMC in Taiwan.

SK hynix is the only South Korean company supplying HBM chips -- the core component of AI accelerators -- to NVIDIA. Samsung is still a few more months away, but right now SK hynix has been enjoying its time in the sun, and it has been a fruitful time to say the least.

Kim Yang-paeng, a researcher at the Korea Institutes for Industrial Economics & Trade, said: "We can assume the sharp increase in exports is related to SK hynix's supplies for TSMC's final packaging of (AI accelerators)".