SK hynix held the groundbreaking ceremony for its Indiana advanced-packaging plant on 27 August local time at Purdue University in West Lafayette, with the release going out at 16:01 UTC. The company is "investing over $4 billion in Indiana fab and first 'Made in USA' next-generation HBM mass production in U.S. to begin in H2 2029." The site runs to approximately 133 acres, about 470,000 square metres.

The sentence that defines the project

From the release: "Cutting edge wafers produced by SK hynix in Korea will be delivered to Indiana, where they will undergo advanced packaging and testing before Made in USA products are supplied to US customers." That is the whole architecture. The DRAM itself is still Korean. Indiana does stacking, packaging and test — plus an Advanced Packaging R&D Testbed alongside the lines, under an MOU with Purdue.

The timeline

Cleanroom opens by October 2028. Mass production of next-generation HBM begins in the second half of 2029. Independent in-window reporting from The Elec sharpens both ends: the first product is HBM4E in Q3 2029 — seventh-generation, two steps beyond what ships today — construction of major facilities starts in October, and annual capacity is expected to reach "hundreds of thousands of units."

What the common framing gets wrong

This will be reported as America getting a domestic HBM chip factory. Three corrections. It is packaging, not fabrication — "Made in USA HBM" here means packaged in the USA, and every DRAM die crossing the Pacific first. Nothing is produced for three years: this is a groundbreaking, not capacity, and it does not touch the current HBM squeeze at all. And the jobs number is doing two jobs — "7,000 direct/indirect local jobs" spans more than 100 partners, while the plant's own staffing figure in the same release is "approximately 1,000 personnel during anticipated commercial operations."

It is not purely private money

Senator Todd Young, present at the ceremony, said: "I was proud to help make this investment possible through the CHIPS and Science Act." The Elec reports the Commerce Department has finalised $458 million in federal grants for the project. The $4bn headline is a subsidised total, not a clean corporate capex figure.