SK Hynix just settled its bonus fight with its own union, agreeing to pay half of all profit-sharing bonuses in cash instead of the 40-60 cash-stock split it had proposed. Labor peace, basically, right as the company is reportedly in early talks with Intel about making memory chips on US soil for the first time. Seoul may not love that idea. Both stocks jumped 4 percent on the news anyway.
It’s a small story that says a lot about where the memory market is right now. Demand from AI infrastructure is straining supply badly enough that a Korean company is looking at building capacity inside the US, in talks with an American chipmaker that’s spent the last few years struggling to stay relevant in advanced manufacturing. If that deal happens, it reshapes where a meaningful slice of the world’s memory gets made.
Worth filing next to it: ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming just passed Gautam Adani to become Asia’s richest person, crossing 105 billion dollars, up eightfold from 13 billion back in March 2019. Different corner of the same boom. The AI wave is minting fortunes and reordering supply chains at the same time, and neither process is finished.
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