Chiang: SK Hynix deal an ‘upset win’ for Indiana
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe president of Purdue University says the $4 billion investment by South Korea-based semiconductor chipmaker SK Hynix Inc. is a transformational opportunity for the university and the state of Indiana.
The company said last week that it would establish a 430,000-square-foot semiconductor advanced packaging fabrication and R&D facility at the Purdue Research Park and create more than 1,000 jobs.
“It’s going to bring the entire supply chain of vendors as well,” Mung Chiang said. “And think about what that means for job creation and talent retention, and then the tax revenue base that can give us even better schools and trails and restaurants.”
In an interview with Inside INdiana Business Host Gerry Dick, Chiang said the deal is unique in three ways.
“This is about advanced packaging of semiconductors, thus completing a missing link in building [a] resilient supply chain for the United States,” he said. “Two, it is memory high end chips for AI applications by SK Hynix as the market leader in that space, so this is going to be transformational for the hard-tech corridor and AI hardware in the state of Indiana. Third, yes, there are bigger fabs elsewhere in the country have recently announced, but this, I believe, is the largest research facility at a university.”
After the announcement last week SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung told IIB that Indiana brought many things to the table, which led to the decision to locate in West Lafayette.
“Indiana has the sufficient infrastructure like water, electricity and everything,” he said. “Additionally, Indiana has Purdue University.”
The plant will house an advanced semiconductor packaging production line that will mass produce next-generation high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, chips, which are a critical component of graphic processing units that train AI systems such as ChatGPT.
Ian Steff, former Assistant U.S. Secretary of Commerce, said the demand for chips has grown exponentially.
“We first started talking 10 years ago when I was then-Chief Innovation Officer, we were talking about tens of millions of transistors on the size of your fingernail,” Steff said. “Today, we’re talking about tens of billions of transistors, and that’s what will be happening here at this facility—packaging those transistors together to enable end applications like AI, like IoT, and really will spur the next major technological developments in automotive, in medical devices.”
Steff echoed Chiang’s sentiment about the ripple effect that the project will have on the community.
“You’re going to see SK Hynix bring with them dozens of suppliers to actually facilitate this major effort, and you’re also going to see leading edge talent come to Indiana,” he said. “Let’s face it, no one state, no one company can single handedly solve the technological challenge on the horizon. Indiana will be among those partners that are solving it.”
The SK Hynix announcement was the latest in many semiconductor wins for Purdue, such as a partnership with Belgium-based Imec for a new research and development hub at the Convergence Center for Innovation and Collaboration on the West Lafayette campus, as well as a $100 million investment in semiconductor research and learning facilities as part of its Purdue Computes initiative.
However, just two days after the SK Hynix project was announced, IIB learned that a $1.8 billion semiconductor plant at Purdue from Minnesota-based SkyWater Technology that was announced in 2022 was no longer on the table.
Chiang, who spoke with IIB before the SkyWater news broke, said he remains bullish on Purdue’s reputation when it comes to semiconductors.
“Purdue has already become America’s number one university in semiconductors and in the foundation of digital economy with dominant strength.”