SK Hynix ties its US NAND fab to a China export license
Washington wants memory fabs built on American soil, and Seoul's biggest memory maker wants something in return. On the same day, ByteDance went shopping for the non-Nvidia half of its chip plan.
SK Hynix is asking Washington to approve exports of US chipmaking equipment to its plant in Dalian, China — and making construction of a new US factory conditional on that approval, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Solidigm, SK Hynix's US unit, wants to install new NAND production equipment in unused space at the Dalian site, known as Mod B, to lift output of the flash that goes into data-center SSDs, according to the report. The Dalian fab runs tools from Lam Research, Applied Materials and KLA. There is no public record of the request: neither Solidigm's pursuit of the license nor its decision to link a US NAND fab to the Chinese one had been previously reported. SK Hynix did not immediately respond to Reuters, Solidigm declined to comment, and the Commerce Department did not respond.
Why it matters: this inverts the onshoring bargain. The Trump administration is pressing SK Hynix, Samsung and other foreign chipmakers to build plants in the US, and Commerce has said it will license existing China fab operations while declining to approve equipment for capacity expansion or technology upgrades — its December license for Dalian capped equipment quantities. So the ask is for exactly the category Washington said it would refuse, offered as the price of a US plant. If it is granted, the US subsidizes domestic capacity while simultaneously enabling more output in China; if it is refused, the US fab plan may simply stall. The timing explains the leverage: memory is the tightest link in the AI buildout, and the squeeze that started in DRAM and HBM reached flash this year. Solidigm has been weighing what would be the first US NAND fab since September — we covered that deliberation when it surfaced — Solidigm weighs the first US NAND fab as the memory squeeze spreads.
ByteDance is close to an agreement to buy custom data-center chips from Taiwan's MediaTek, in talks that would make it MediaTek's second major customer for such ASICs after Google, according to Bloomberg. The chips are application-specific designs tailored for ByteDance's own data centers rather than off-the-shelf accelerators, and unit volumes were not disclosed. MediaTek is best known for phone silicon; it has spent the past year pushing into data-center custom chips, and Nvidia took a stake in the company in August specifically to keep that lane inside its own rack fabric — Nvidia pays $3.5B for MediaTek's custom-silicon handshake.
The interesting part is the sourcing map underneath. ByteDance is the world's most aggressive buyer of Nvidia hardware and has been told by Beijing to file its Nvidia purchase plans, a squeeze we covered at the time — Beijing tells Alibaba and ByteDance to file Nvidia purchase plans. A Taiwan-designed ASIC is a different export-control conversation than a top-bin Nvidia part, and a Chinese hyperscaler that designs its own accelerator and rents the manufacturing is a customer Western export rules are much less able to reach. If MediaTek signs, the custom-silicon wave stops being an American hyperscaler story.
What to watch: whether Commerce answers the Solidigm license request before the year-end license window closes, and whether ByteDance's MediaTek deal gets a unit-volume number that would tell us how serious the substitution really is.
Would you trade approval for a US memory fab for a license to expand in China? Tell us in the comments.
