SK Chey Tae-won Appointed Chairman of the Board at US NAND Flash Subsidiary Solidigm

AI-oriented SSD Demand Increase and Direct Oversight of AI Semiconductor Strategy Expected

Choi Tae-won, Chairman of SK Group, is giving a presentation at the 'SK Directors Summit 2024'. Photo by SK

Choi Tae-won, Chairman of SK Group, will serve as the chairman of the board of directors of Solidigm, SK Hynix's U.S. NAND flash memory subsidiary.

According to SK Inc.'s Q3 quarterly report on the 14th, Chairman Choi concurrently holds the position of chairman of Solidigm's board. It is known that he joined Solidigm's board and was elected chairman through the board meeting in September.

Solidigm is a U.S. subsidiary established after SK Hynix invested approximately 11 trillion won in 2021 to acquire Intel's NAND flash business division. Since its launch, it had been recording losses due to the semiconductor market downturn, but in the second quarter of this year, it recorded a net profit of 78.6 billion won, marking its first profitable turnaround since joining SK. Sales in the second quarter surged 212% year-on-year to 3.9763 trillion won.

Recently, with the increase in AI data center investments by global big tech companies, demand for high-capacity SSDs has significantly risen, gradually boosting market expectations for Solidigm. Currently, Solidigm is leading the NAND solution market for AI data centers by commercializing the industry's first QLC-based ultra-high-capacity enterprise SSD (eSSD) that can store 4 bits per cell. The day before, it also launched a new QLC-based eSSD product with the world's largest capacity of 122TB (terabytes).