Nvidia-supplier SK Hynix third-quarter profit jumps 62% to a record high on AI-fueled memory demand (www.cnbc.com)

South Korea’s SK Hynix reported record third-quarter results driven by surging demand for AI hardware: revenue rose about 39% year‑on‑year to 24.45 trillion won ($17.13 billion) and operating profit jumped 62% to 11.38 trillion won. On a quarter‑on‑quarter basis revenue increased 10% and operating profit grew 24%. Results were essentially in line with LSEG SmartEstimates (slightly below on both measures), and the company attributed the gains to higher sales of “high value‑added” products tied to expanding investments in AI infrastructure. The driver is high‑bandwidth memory (HBM), a high‑performance form of DRAM used in AI data‑center servers and generative AI accelerators; SK Hynix has an early lead and is a main supplier to Nvidia. That position gives the company strong earnings leverage as HBM demand scales with large language models and GPU clusters — analysts forecast the HBM market could reach roughly $43 billion by 2027. The technical and strategic implication for the AI/ML community is clearer supply-chain concentration around a few HBM specialists, making SK Hynix’s product roadmap, capacity and competitive edge important variables for GPU server performance, pricing and the pace of AI infrastructure deployment.