Solidigm, the NAND flash arm of South Korean memory giant SK Hynix, has announced plans to construct its inaugural manufacturing facility in the United States. The project is intended to help the group mitigate global supply‑chain disruptions and reduce exposure to geopolitical risks, according to sources familiar with the plan.
The company already maintains a U.S. headquarters and an R&D centre, but all of its wafer‑fabrication capacity is currently located abroad. Solidigm’s existing operations include Fab 1 in Dalian, China, and an accelerated build‑out of a second plant, Fab 2, nearby, which together are slated to lift monthly output from roughly 100,000 wafers to about 150,000 wafers by 2027 – a 50 percent increase.
The expansion follows SK Hynix’s 2021 acquisition of Intel’s NAND flash business, after which the newly branded Solidigm continued to produce chips in China without opening any overseas fabs. The planned U.S. plant therefore marks the first step toward a broader, geographically diversified manufacturing footprint.
In addition to scaling volume, Solidigm will begin producing a new generation of floating‑gate 3D QLC NAND flash that packs more than 200 active storage layers per chip. The high‑density design is aimed at multi‑terabyte enterprise solid‑state drives, a market where capacity demands are rising sharply as artificial‑intelligence workloads consume ever larger data sets.
While QLC NAND offers higher density, it is slower and less durable than the more common TLC variant. Nonetheless, Solidigm’s executives argue that the trade‑off is acceptable for data‑center applications that prioritize sheer capacity over endurance, especially as AI and cloud services drive demand for larger, denser storage solutions.
If the U.S. fab proceeds as reported, Solidigm will become the first SK Hynix‑owned NAND flash producer with a manufacturing presence on American soil, potentially easing supply‑chain concerns for domestic customers and giving the group a more resilient production network amid ongoing trade tensions.