SK Hynix Subsidiary Solidigm Plans to Build NAND Wafer Fab in the U.S., Funding Plan Yet to Be Determined
nashnova research
SK Hynix's Solidigm is weighing a new NAND flash wafer fab in the U.S. to reduce its sole reliance on a plant in Dalian, China; the project is likely to move forward, but funding and timeline remain undecided.
Why does Solidigm need to move production out of Dalian?
Solidigm's entire NAND wafer output comes from a single site in Dalian, China — no backup.
This means → any disruption at Dalian breaks the whole supply chain. Classic single-point-of-failure risk.
U.S. export controls block advanced manufacturing equipment from entering Dalian, so the line cannot migrate to higher-layer NAND processes.
In plain terms = the problem isn't Dalian itself — equipment restrictions cap the technology ceiling. To build more advanced products, Solidigm needs a fab somewhere else.
Why New York State?
SK Hynix is in talks with New York State officials, making it the leading candidate site.
New York has been aggressively courting memory-chip investment; Micron is already spending heavily there, and power and water infrastructure are relatively mature.
This reflects a memory-chip cluster taking shape in the state — shared suppliers and logistics lower the barrier for a new fab.
Today only Micron's Manassas, Virginia plant produces NAND wafers in the U.S., and that line is primarily DRAM. A Solidigm fab would meaningfully expand domestic NAND capacity.
Where will the money come from — the biggest open question?
Solidigm has shelved its pre-IPO funding review and U.S. listing assessment, ruling out capital markets in the near term.
This means → the most likely source of funds is parent company SK Hynix itself.
SK Hynix is already stretched across multiple big-ticket projects: a U.S. HBM packaging-and-test facility — HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), the ultra-fast memory built specifically for AI chips — plus the Yongin industrial complex in Korea. Adding a NAND fab significantly increases its capital-expenditure burden.
How much cost potential U.S. government subsidies can absorb is the key lever in moving talks forward.
What does the AI boom have to do with this?
Training and running AI models demands not just HBM but massive volumes of enterprise SSDs to store data.
Solidigm is positioned squarely in the enterprise-SSD market and can directly capture this AI-driven storage surge.
In plain terms = HBM solves the "compute fast" problem; enterprise SSDs solve the "store it all" problem — AI needs both.
Whether Solidigm and U.S. authorities can agree on investment terms will determine if this project moves from consideration to ground-breaking.
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