SK Hynix quarterly earnings top estimatesnomadictrails

South Korea’s SK Hynix on Thursday topped quarterly revenue and operating profit estimates, as demand for its high bandwidth memory offerings used in artificial intelligence chipsets stayed strong.

Here are SK Hynix’s first-quarter results versus LSEG SmartEstimates:

• Revenue: 17.64 trillion won ($12.36 billion) vs. 17.26 trillion won
• Operating profit: 7.44 trillion won vs. 6.62 trillion won

Revenue rose about 42% in the March quarter compared with the same period a year earlier, while operating profit surged 158%, year on year.

On a quarter-on-quarter basis, revenue dropped 11%, while operating profit fell 8% from a record high in the December quarter.

SK Hynix is a leading supplier of dynamic random access memory — a type of semiconductor memory found in PCs, workstations and servers that is used to store data and program code.

The company warned that macroeconomic uncertainties including U.S. tariff policy have created demand volatility that will impact the second half of the year.

“While reciprocal tariff measures between some countries are currently suspended, there are growing concerns that tariff can be applied to semiconductor products,” an SK Hynix executive said in a Thursday earnings call. The company expects a relatively limited impact from tariffs on its artificial intelligence server demand.

Meanwhile, demand from consumer electronics such as PCs and smartphones is expected to benefit from the launch of new products that feature AI functionalities this year.

In its earnings release, SK Hynix said that its first-quarter profits demonstrated AI’s impact in the memory market.

The memory chipmaker expects Big Tech’s spending on AI to continue, with the ecosystem’s expansion to be driven by open-source AI model offerings, and “sovereign AI projects” that will stoke memory demand.

“With development cost decreasing, initiatives for AI development have surged, which has led to a sharp increase in demand,” a company executive said.

SK Hynix cited DeepSeek’s open-source R1 reasoning model, which achieved competitive performance with limited hardware resources earlier this year, as an example of a catalyst for AI development.

The company has benefitted from a boom in AI servers as a key supplier of high bandwidth memory, or HBM — a type of DRAM used in artificial intelligence servers — to clients such as the U.S. AI darling Nvidia. Micron Technology and Samsung Electronics are the other players in the space.

A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month said that SK Hynix had captured 70% of the HBM market by revenue share in the first quarter.

This HBM dominance helped it overtake Samsung in the overall DRAM market for the first time ever, with a 36% global market share as compared to Samsung’s 34%, the report added.

SK Hynix shares fell 0.9% in Asia.