SK Hynix, 3 other tech giants to take stakes in Nanya Technology

Taipei, March 26 (CNA) South Korea's SK Hynix and three other international tech giants will invest in Taiwan's Nanya Technology Corp., taking a stake in the Taiwanese dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chipmaker in a likely bid to boost their role in artificial intelligence development.

SK Hynix's subsidiary Solidigm Inc., Japanese Kioxia Corp., and two American companies -- Cisco Systems Inc. and SanDisk International's unit SanDisk Technologies -- will inject a total of NT$78.72 billion (US$2.47 billion) into Nanya Technology through a private placement, the Taiwanese chipmaker said in a statement posted Wednesday on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, where its shares are traded.

After the investments, SK Hynix is expected to take a 2 percent stake in Nanya Technology, Kioxia 2 percent, SanDisk 4 percent, and Cisco 2 percent, the statement said.

On Wednesday, Nanya Technology announced the pricing of the private placement for the four investors to subscribe to its shares at NT$223.9 each, a small discount to Nanya Technology's closing price of NT$226.5 that day.

The four foreign investors will acquire an aggregate 351.57 million Nanya Technology common shares through the private placement, which is scheduled to be completed on April 8, the company said.

The funds raised from the private placement will be invested in advanced memory chip development and expand production capacity, Nanya Technology said.

Liu Pei-chen (劉佩真), an economist with the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER), told CNA it is not purely a financial investment by the four companies but also a strategic move to enhance their roles in artificial intelligence development.

Taiwanese memory chip suppliers like Nanya Technology are playing a critical role in the current AI boom, moving away from the concept that they are just followers of their foreign counterparts, Liu said.

SK Hynix, the second largest DRAM supplier in the world, is expected to take advantage of the Taiwanese company's technology strength, focusing on high bandwidth memory (HBM) development, which is crucial to AI computing, she said.

Static random access memory (SRAM) technology is also one of the strengths of Taiwan's memory chip suppliers, Liu said, adding that this technology is expected to raise the local memory chip industry's profile in AI development.