SK hynix expands U.S. presence with new Bellevue, Seattle office in efforts to get closer to its largest customers — offices near Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft highlight co-designed HBM efforts
SK hynix is expanding its U.S. presence with a new office in the Seattle metropolitan area, placing the world’s leading HBM supplier within minutes of Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft.
(Image credit: Getty Images / Jung Yeon-Je)
SK hynix is expanding its U.S. presence with a new office in the Seattle metropolitan area, placing the world’s leading HBM supplier within minutes of Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft.
According to industry sources cited by DigiTimes, the South Korean company has leased approximately 5,500 square feet at City Center Bellevue, just east of Seattle. While modest in size, the location and timing make the expansion far more consequential than a routine regional office opening.
SK hynix is sitting squarely in the middle of the ongoing AI hardware boom, supplying the majority of the HBM used in Nvidia’s data center accelerators and increasingly serving hyperscale customers building their own AI silicon. Establishing a physical foothold in the Pacific Northwest puts the company closer to the customers driving its fastest-growing and most important business.
Moving closer to the center of AI development
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SK hynix has spent the past two years transforming itself from a cyclical commodity DRAM vendor into a leading supplier for AI infrastructure. That's visible in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), where SK hynix was first to mass-produce HBM3 and has remained ahead in yield and volume as customers transitioned from HBM2E. In August 2025, the company overtook Samsung in global DRAM revenue for the first time, a change largely attributed to HBM shipments for Nvidia’s H100 and H200 AI accelerators.
Seattle and its surrounding suburbs have become one of the densest concentrations of the AI industry ecosystem outside of Silicon Valley. While Nvidia maintains a significant engineering presence in the region, Amazon’s AWS Skills Center is based nearby, and Microsoft’s Azure silicon and systems groups are spread across Redmond and Bellevue.
HBM is not a plug-and-play component. Memory stacks are co-designed with GPUs and AI accelerators, and performance, power, and reliability targets are refined through repeated cycles of joint validation. Physical proximity will allow faster iteration when issues arise, whether related to signal integrity, thermals, or packaging tolerances.
Amazon’s recent launch of its Trainium3 AI accelerator, which integrates 144GB of HBM3E, shows how quickly hyperscalers are increasing their reliance on stacked memory. Microsoft and are following . Each of those programs depends on close coordination between the silicon designer and the memory supplier; a Seattle-area office gives SK hynix a seat at that table.
