SK Hynix has officially broken ground on a $4 billion advanced memory manufacturing hub in Indiana focused on high-bandwidth memory production.
South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix broke ground on a sprawling semiconductor facility in West Lafayette, Indiana, on August 27, marking the company’s first manufacturing footprint on American soil. Valued at over $4 billion, the project will focus on packaging next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips specifically designed for artificial intelligence workloads. It stands as the largest single development project in Indiana’s history.
The facility sits on a 133.5-acre site at Purdue Research Park, where foundation and piling work has been underway since early 2026. The groundbreaking ceremony formalized months of ongoing construction. Cleanroom operations, where the actual chip packaging will take place, are expected to come online in the second half of 2028.
SK Hynix is not fabricating raw silicon wafers in Indiana. Instead, the facility will take memory chips and stack them into the dense, high-performance modules that AI processors require. This strategic expansion leverages the company’s dominant market position; according to Counterpoint Research, SK Hynix held a 58% share of the global HBM market by revenue in Q1 2026.
When SK Hynix first announced the Indiana plans in 2024, the investment was pegged at $3.87 billion. The figure now exceeds $4 billion. The project is backed by nearly $1 billion in federal support under the CHIPS and Science Act, comprising up to $458 million in direct grants and $500 million in loans, finalized in December 2024.
Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google are among SK Hynix’s biggest HBM buyers, and all three are headquartered in the United States. While SK Hynix is simultaneously expanding capacity in South Korea, the Indiana site provides crucial geographic diversification that did not previously exist.
The project is expected to create approximately 7,000 direct and indirect jobs. To support this workforce, SK Hynix has been developing a collaboration pipeline with Purdue University to build a local talent base in semiconductor engineering. For Indiana, a $4 billion facility and thousands of new jobs will reshape the local economy around West Lafayette, establishing a semiconductor ecosystem where none existed before.
The broader CHIPS Act initiative has attracted tens of billions of dollars in commitments from major chipmakers, including TSMC, Samsung, and Intel, all of whom are building or expanding U.S. facilities. Within the memory sector, Samsung has been investing heavily to close the HBM gap, while Micron—the only U.S.-headquartered major memory manufacturer—has its own HBM ambitions.