SEOUL, April 23 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's memory chip giant SK hynix logged its record earnings in the first quarter thanks to strong sales of memory chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) chipsets, the company said Thursday.
The company's revenue surged 198.1 percent from a year earlier to reach a new quarterly high of 52.58 trillion won (about 35.48 billion U.S. dollars) in the January-March quarter, topping 50 trillion won for the first time.
Its operating profit skyrocketed 405.5 percent to a record high of 37.61 trillion won, and its net income soared 397.6 percent to 40.35 trillion won.
The operating margin hit a fresh high of 72 percent, with the net margin reaching 77 percent.
Despite a seasonal downturn in the first quarter, strong demand persisted due to the expanded global investments in AI infrastructure, lifting sales of high-value-added products such as high-bandwidth memory, high-capacity server DRAM modules and enterprise solid state drives, the chipmaker said.
The company said that 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 chip demand will expand across both DRAM and NAND flash.
The spread of memory efficiency technologies was forecast to enhance the economic viability of AI services, leading to an expansion of the overall service scale and further driving memory demand, it noted. ■