SEOUL, Oct 24, 2024 (BSS/AFP) - South Korean chip giant SK hynix reported record quarterly profits Thursday thanks to soaring global demand for artificial intelligence, and gave a positive outlook for next year.

The world's second-largest memory chip maker dominates the market for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) semiconductors and is a key supplier for US titan Nvidia.

SK hynix said it made a net profit of 5.75 trillion won ($4.17 billion) in July-September and operating profit of 7.03 trillion won that surpassed the previous record set in the third quarter of 2018, during the peak of the semiconductor boom.

The news comes after Taiwanese chip giant TSMC last week announced a bigger-than-expected increase in third-quarter net profit and raised its growth forecasts for the year on "extremely robust" demand for AI technology.

Revenues jumped 94 percent on-year to 17.6 trillion won, which was also an all-time high, with the firm crediting "expanding sales of premium products such as HBM and eSSD".

Revenues for HBM chips rose more than 70 percent from the previous quarter and 330 percent on-year.

"While the demand for memory for AI servers such as HBM and eSSD has grown noticeably this year, the company predicts that this trend will continue next year," it said in a statement.

"This is because generative AI is developing into a multi-modal form and global big tech companies continue to invest to develop artificial general intelligence," the company added.

Despite the news, SK hynix's shares fell in Seoul morning trade.

"SK hynix has solidified its position as the world's number one AI memory company by achieving the highest business performance ever in the third quarter of this year," said chief financial officer Kim Woo-hyun.

SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung said this week that the company remained on track to begin mass production and supply of its cutting-edge HBM3E AI chips to clients, including Nvidia, which controls about 80 percent of the global AI semiconductor market.

Kwak told reporters that "there's no change in our schedule" for the mass production of the 12-layer HBM3E by the end of the year. "Everything's going well regarding shipment and supply timing," he said.

On Tuesday, Trendforce, a Taipei-based research group, predicted that the global HBM market will expand 156 percent next year, increasing from $18.2 billion this year to $46.7 billion.