SK Hynix announced the acquisition of Intel's NAND and SSD business in October 2020, and Solidigm is an independent U.S. subsidiary formed by SK Hynix after the completion of the first phase of the acquisition in late 2021.

Solidigm D5-P5336 Solid State Drive

▲ Solidigm D5-P5336, E1.L specification, 61.44TB

Due to the combined influence of internal and external factors, Solidigm fell into consecutive annual losses shortly after its establishment, and net profit was negative for 12 quarters starting from the second quarter of 2021.

However, recently due to the rapid growth of server demand such as AI reasoning, Solidigm performance, which has a leading position in enterprise solid state drives, has gradually improved, following positive operating profit in the first quarter of this year, net profit in the second quarter of this year also returned to positive numbers.

Solidigm is one of the few companies that can provide ultra-large capacity (64TB level) QLC enterprise solid state drives. Giants like Amazon, Google, Dell and others rushed to place orders with Solidigm in order to secure hard drive supplies before competitors.

In addition, SK Hynix and Solidigm also plan to launch 128TB of original capacity enterprise solid state drives early next year, 256TB products are also in the pipeline.

Solidigm D7-P5810 Solid State Drive

▲ Solidigm D7-P5810, 1.6TB, U.2

In order to cope with the increasing enterprise demand, Solidigm urgently needed to obtain the capital to expand the business; On the other hand, SK Hynix is about to pay Intel $2 billion (currently about 14.536 billion yuan) for the second stage of the acquisition in March 2025, and also needs to withdraw some funds.

In this context, SK Group internal executives put forward a plan to promote Solidigm listing in the United States. Korean media estimates that Solidigm's market value is expected to reach 20 trillion to 30 trillion won ( note: currently about 104.86 billion to 157.29 billion yuan).

Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson said:

We find this news credible as SK Hynix has previously had plans to spin off Solidigm, and the company's recent recovery has made this option more viable.

We believe the success of SK Hynix's efforts will depend on how the new organization is spun off (e.g., which assets are included within Solidigm and which SK Hynix retains) and how Hynix/Solidigm discusses future technology plans.

Especially considering that Dalian NAND's existing roadmap - including the QLC components that have enabled Solidigm's recent success with high-capacity enterprise SSDS - seems to end at layer 196.