SK Hynix breaks ground on a $4B memory packaging hub in Indiana

SK Hynix has broken ground on a plant costing more than $4B in West Lafayette, Indiana, its first US base for packaging high-bandwidth memory, with production due in the second half of 2029. Intel’s equivalent assembly and testing plant near Wroclaw was cancelled last year after state aid had been approved.

SK Hynix has put a shovel in the ground in West Lafayette, Indiana. The plant will cost more than $4B, occupy 133.5 acres and become the company’s first base in the United States for packaging high-bandwidth memory, employing about 1,000 people.

The dates are a long way out. Chief executive Kwak Noh-Jung said the cleanroom should open by October 2028, with mass production of next-generation HBM starting in the second half of 2029.

What the plant does matters more than what it costs. Advanced packaging stacks finished chips into a single part, and it is the step that makes Nvidia’s most capable accelerators possible at all.

Washington is paying towards it. The CHIPS and Science Act allows SK Hynix up to $458M in direct funding and up to $500M in loans for the project.

Europe had this exact facility and lost it. Intel’s €4.6B assembly and testing plant near Wroclaw was the same category of investment, promising 2,000 jobs.

It never broke ground. The Commission approved €1.7B of Polish state aid in September 2024, Intel suspended the project that same month, and cancelled it outright in July 2025.

Europe’s own auditors had already done the arithmetic. The Court of Auditors noted that the Commission’s own forecast put the bloc at 11.7% of global chip production value by 2030, against a target of 20%.

The money gap explains most of it. The auditors put total Chips Act funding at roughly €86B to 2030, of which the Commission itself provides €4.5B, against €405B spent by the largest global manufacturers in three years.

Brussels has answered with ambition. June’s tech sovereignty package pitches a European foundry capable of 3nm production and €120B of investment by 2035.

Packaging is not in that pitch. The capability Europe had approved, funded and then watched walk away is the one America is now pouring concrete for.

SK Hynix has no shortage of alternatives either. It has already shipped HBM4E samples to AI customers and committed tens of billions to new Korean capacity.

So the European question is not really whether the bloc can fund a leading-edge fab. It is who would assemble the chips afterwards, and where.