SK Hynix is building a ~$3.87B advanced packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Highlights:
- ~430,000 sq ft plant at Purdue Research Park.
- It will package and mass-produce next-gen HBM (high-bandwidth memory), the stacked-DRAM chips that sit next to GPUs and feed AI training.
- HBM is one of the single biggest bottlenecks in AI compute right now.
- SK Hynix already owns over 50% of the global HBM market.
- Why West Lafayette: Purdue's semiconductor talent pipeline, plus Indiana is one of the most manufacturing-intensive states in the US.
- Jobs impact: 1,000+ direct new jobs (engineering, technical, admin, maintenance), high-paying, with an estimated ~7,000 total direct and indirect jobs across construction, R&D, and operations per SK Hynix.
- It also lands in an already-deep cluster. Other anchors in Greater Lafayette: Subaru, Caterpillar, Wabash National, Rolls-Royce, Saab, GE Aviation, Evonik, Arconic, Nanshan, Tate & Lyle, SEL/Schweitzer, and Kirby Risk.
A plant like this pulls a wave of suppliers who need to be close by, and that spillover has the potential to create a whole industrial cluster around it.
We're personally tracking this market because we think it's going to rip.