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FLASH SK hynix on Solidigm pre-IPO rumors: 'No matters have been determined' The status of Solidigm, SK hynix’s acquired Intel NAND and SSD division, is shrouded in fog after the company made an SEC disclosure late last week to emphasize that "while the Company’s overseas subsidiary under the brand name 'Solidigm' is reviewing various measures to strengthen its competitiveness, no matters have been determined." It was responding to August 5 reports from the Korea Economic Daily (aka “Hankyung”) that the US subsidiary of SK hynix was "pursuing a pre-IPO capital raising of approximately Won 5 trillion." In a statement, the company said it wished to clarify, that nothing had been decided, adding that SK hynix would update the markets "either when specific details are confirmed or within three months of the date of this report." SK Hynix bought Solidigm from Intel in 2021 for $9 billion, with a multi-year payment deal: $7 billion initially and c $1.9 billion in March 2025, which has now completed. SK Hynix now fully owns Solidigm. The business basically consists of a fab in Dalian China, operated by a separate SK Hynix business unit, SK Semiconductor (Dalian) Co., plus a Rancho Cordova, CA, NAND and SSD research operation, and Soldigm’s sales and business operations headquartered in California. SK Hynix is setting up a US-based AI company, AICo, which will own the Solidigm business and pursue other opportunities. However, other reports also came out at the end of August about external initiatives to invest in Solidigm. First, former SK Hynix president Roh Jong-won set up Techbridge Investment, a US private equity firm, to invest in a future potential Solidigm IPO, according to Korea’s Seoul Economic Daily outlet. B&F notes that SK Hynix has never formally announced it will pursue a Solidigm IPO, although if reports are true that institutional investors such as Mubadala, the UAE sovereign wealth fund, are interested in investing in Solidigm through lead manager Goldman Sachs, this would suggest an IPO as the eventual outcome. Roh Jong-won is well-placed to be aware of SK Hynix intentions, as he was the architect for SK Hynix’s acquisition of Solidigm. He has been SK Hynix’s CFO, and was involved in its investment in Kioxia via Bain Capital. Secondly, Korea’s SE Daily says SK Hynix has valued Solidigm at ₩50 trillion $36 billion and has a ₩10 trillion ($7.2 billion) target for Solidigm fund raising. Now SK Hynix's statement saying it would only talk "when details are finalized" or otherwise "within three months,” have left industry watchers hanging. This leaves Solidgm's future in a hazy state. Soldigm role SK Hynix is expanding output capacity at its Solidigm NAND wafer manufacturing plant in Dalian, China. Plant 1 is the original fab and in full production. Construction of the new Plant 2 has resumed after a prior business downturn. But, Solidigm NAND uses a different technology from SK Hynix NAND and is restricted to lower 3D NAND layer counts. V9 SK Hynix NAND uses charge trap technology and has 321 layers with V10 having 375. Solidigm’s current 3D NAND generation has 192 layers, focusses on QLC for high capacity, and its Dalian plant uses floating gate technology. It’s developing 245 TB SSDs using this technology, due by the end of the year, and these will have more than 200 layers. A combination of increased layer count and cell size reduction though lateral and vertical scaling will give it the die capacity it needs to build a 245 TB drive. It also has charge trap-based SSDs, like its PS1010 direct-attach drive, in its portfolio. This uses SK Hynix v7 generation 176-layer TLC NAND made in Cheongju, South Korea. Here we see Solidigm being used to sell mature SK Hynix NAND-based drives, becoming an SK Hynix go-to-market (GTM) operation. SK hynix and Kioxia A complicating factor is that SK hynix is also an investor in its competitor Kioxia, having participated in the Bain consortium that bought Toshiba’s memory business in 2018, and then set up Kioxia basin independent business with a Tokyo Stock Exchange listing at the end of 2024. As Toshiba is reducing its own holding in Kioxia, SK Hynix is now Kioxia’s largest shareholder, via its convertible bond holding in the Bain Capital-affiliated BCPE Pangea Cayman2 company. However it has no Kioxia voting rights as it does not own Kioxia’s shares directly. SK Hynix wants to increase its NAND manufacturing capacity outside Korea and China. An interview in Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won as saying joint NAND production with Kioxia is “one option,” with another being to build an SK Hynix fab in Japan, either with or without Kioxia. He said: “If SK Hynix is included in Kioxia’s future strategy, we are prepared to become a partner at any time.” That could mean joint production, research and development, and sharing of supply chains. But he also said: “If we can no longer build any kind of co-operative relationship, we will likely end our investment in Kioxia.” Comment It seems odd that SK Group’s chairman is commenting on potential SK Hynix-Kioxia partnership deals without any public Kioxia contribution or comment. We could interpret this as SK Hynix putting pressure on Kioxia. That company has a single NAND architecture focus, shared with Sandisk. Why would it want to embrace a separate SK Hynix architecture? Why would SK Hynix want to embrace a separate Kioxia NAND architecture? Is the Kioxia partnership more about HBM than NAND? As SK Hynix and Sandisk are involved in high bandwidth flash (HBF), is SK Hynix wanting to get Kioxia involved in it as well? What would Sandisk think about Kioxia partnering wth SK Hynix? Questions and more questions. The whole picture is confused, and SK Hynix, unable to use the latest NAND technology in Dalian, due to US tech export restrictions, is stuck with bearing the cost of having a second NAND architecture manufacturing facility in China. It's also not yet capable of forming a clear message about its intentions in the USA regarding Solidigm operations there, Solidigm’s status as a business entity, and the operations of AI Co. Watch all these spaces and, hopefully, the fog will clear.
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