Micron vs. SK Hynix: Which Is the Better Memory Stock to Buy?

With surging demand, limited production capacity, and skyrocketing prices, the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) market has been red-hot this year. While there are three big players in the memory space, SK Hynix (NASDAQ: SKHY) and Micron (NASDAQ: MU) stand out as the two pure plays for investors to choose from, as the third supplier, Samsung, is a massive conglomerate involved in a variety of businesses.The DRAM market is being driven by surging data center demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which is packaged with graphics processing units (GPUs) and other AI chips to help optimize their performance. Inference tends to be even more memory reliant than AI model training, so the pickup in this segment of the AI market is helping drive demand even more. With high prices and strong margins supported by demand that well exceeds what they are able to produce, the big three memory makers have turned most of their focus to increasing their HBM manufacturing capacity.However, with HBM, GPUs, and other high-performance chips all being manufactured using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography and only one company in the world, ASML, able to make the massive and complex machines required, there is a limit to how much chipmaking capacity can be added in a single year. On top of that, producing HBM requires upwards of three times the wafer capacity as ordinary DRAM, which further limits capacity increases.Continue readingWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei MotleyFool Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei MotleyFool