SEOUL, April 23 - South Korea's SK Hynix reported a more than five-fold increase in operating profit for the first quarter, saying the artificial intelligence boom has strengthened demand for both advanced and conventional memory products.
The company posted 37.6 trillion won in operating profit for the January-March period, up from 7.4 trillion won a year earlier. That result matched closely with a 37.9 trillion won forecast from LSEG SmartEstimate, an aggregate that places greater weight on analysts with a stronger track record of accuracy.
Quarterly revenue rose 198% to 52.6 trillion won. The company noted the expanding role of AI across service environments as a key driver of memory consumption, saying in a statement: "As AI evolves from large model training to the stage of agentic AI, which repeatedly performs real-time inference across various service environments, the foundation for memory demand is expanding across both DRAM and NAND flash."
SK Hynix additionally highlighted its position as a supplier to Nvidia as part of the context for the demand surge, while reporting the quarter's results in the local currency - with the exchange rate at the time cited as $1 = 1,478.8600 won.
The company emphasized that the broadening applications of AI - moving beyond training to more continuous, real-time inference tasks - are supporting demand across different types of memory products. The statement framed this shift as expanding the underlying market for both DRAM and NAND flash components, which are used in a range of computing and data center deployments.
SK Hynix's quarterly results underline a significant upswing in sales and profitability tied to the current wave of AI-related spending, with operating profit hitting a record level for the firm and revenue rising sharply compared with the prior year period.