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In a two-day strategy meeting, SK Group revealed plans to focus on AI and chips to support its semiconductor business, which has faced profit losses in recent years.
South Korean semiconductor company SK Hynix plans to invest 103trn won – or roughly $74.5bn – into its business by 2028 to focus on chips and AI.
The investment is part of broader plans by parent company SK Group to grow its business. The company announced the plan during a two-day strategy meeting last week, which looked at various ways to streamline the company and focus on growth markets.
At the meeting, SK Group said will improve its competitiveness by focusing on its AI value chain, such as AI data centres, AI products and high bandwidth memory chips, Reuters reports.
The conglomerate’s chipmaker SK Hynix has been struggling in recent years with profit losses, but this fortune was reversed earlier this year thanks to an increase in the sales of AI server products, CNBC reported in April.
SK Hynix is a major global chipmaker and supplies high-bandwidth memory chips for companies such as Nvidia, which has soared in value over the past couple of years thanks to its own AI focus.
During the two-day meeting, SK Group executives agreed on a plan to secure 80trn won by 2026 through profitability improvement, business structure optimisation and synergy enhancement, AJU Press reports.
The decision by SK Group to focus more on AI follows a surge in valuation for some key players in the sector, such as Nvidia and Microsoft.
Nvidia made a sudden surge last month, when it raced past both Apple and Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable company. This was short-lived however, as the company has taken a hit to its valuation in recent weeks, pushing it back down to third place.
Apple has managed to regain its position behind Microsoft and was boosted last month by its Worldwide Developers Conference, when it finally made a push into AI with its Apple Intelligence announcement.
But Apple revealed plans to postpone the release of several upcoming AI features in the EU market because of issues it has with requirements stemming from the Digital Markets Act. EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager called this decision a “stunning, open declaration” of the company’s attempts to “disable competition” in the region.
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