SK Hynix saw a surge in customer deposits during the fourth quarter last year, the memory chip giant’s regulatory filings showed.
The company said it received 57.5 billion won in advanced payment and 1.5855 trillion won in customer liabilities, or customer deposits where an entity receives advanced payment for obligations to provide them with goods or services later.
The customer deposit amount is a 1.3 trillion won increase from the prior quarter, a jump that is unprecedented for SK Hynix in the last three years.
Sources said the deposit comes from the South Korean chipmaker’s customer Nvidia.
SK Hynix received the payment to expand its production capacity for HBM3E during the third quarter, they said.
The company had announced back in October during its conference call for the third quarter that its capacity for HBM3 and HBM3E has been sold out, adding that it was in talks to become the primary vendor of the chips with existing customers and potential customers.
It is rare for a memory chipmaker to receive such payment in advance and it reflects Nvidia’s desire to secure a stable supply of high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, which are seeing demand for them surge as they are paired with GPUs used in AI applications.
SK Hynix is ahead of its rivals Samsung and Micron in terms of HBM supply and is currently the exclusive supplier of HBM3E chips to Nvidia.
Though Samsung and Micron have also announced their plan to expand HBM production output, SK Hynix will likely continue to dominate the market in the short term.
