The US Department of Commerce approved on Thursday (December 19) a government subsidy of up to $458 million to South Korean semiconductor company SK Hynix, to support the funding of an advanced chip packaging plant in Indiana and research and development facilities for artificial intelligence (AI) products.
In April this year, SK Hynix, a supplier for Nvidia, announced plans to invest $3.87 billion to build a new plant in West Lafayette, Indiana, which includes an assembly line capable of mass-producing next-generation high-bandwidth memory chips.
In a statement released by the Commerce Department, the US government will also provide a $500 million government loan for the project. The subsidies will be disbursed in installments as SK Hynix achieves specific milestones in the project construction process.
The Commerce Department noted that the project will create 1,000 job opportunities and address key gaps in the US semiconductor supply chain.
SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung expressed in a statement that the company looks forward to collaborating with various parties to establish “a strong and resilient AI semiconductor supply chain in the United States.”
SK Hynix is a South Korean supplier of Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM) chips and Flash memory chips, and is one of the largest semiconductor suppliers globally. The company’s major clients include Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Asus, Dell, MSI, HP, among others.