SK Hynix Evacuates Thousands Of Workers At Chip Plant After Fire, Toxic Gas Leak

One week, unions are threatening labor action at memory giant Samsung. The next, SK Hynix suffers an industrial accident. Together, the events highlight just how fragile the global memory supply chain has become at a time when AI data center buildouts have already pushed memory chip supply into extraordinarily tight territory.

South Korea's main national wire service, Yonhap News Agency, reports that SK Hynix, the world's second-largest DRAM producer, evacuated about 3,600 workers from its Cheongju semiconductor factory in South Korea after a fire and toxic gas leak.

The fire erupted Monday mid-morning in a sixth-floor gas room connecting the M15 and M15X plants and was quickly extinguished by the factory's fire suppression system. Seven people were injured.

SK Hynix believes the incident may have originated from a gas pipeline, adding that production lines for critical memory chips were not impacted.

SK Hynix is one of the world's top three memory chip companies, alongside Samsung and Micron. It controlled about 32% of the DRAM market in 4Q25, behind Samsung at 36% but ahead of Micron at 22.4%, according to TrendForce data.

This means that if the industrial accident had been more severe, any real production disruption at SK Hynix could have sparked a surge in DRAM prices. In other words, SK Hynix is a bottleneck supplier for the AI trade.

Our report early last week added to optimism in the DRAM and NAND memory chip markets because there is new evidence that China is flooding the chip market.

The Amazon price-tracking website CamelCamelCamel shows that retail pricing for DDR5 64GB memory chips dropped from $925 to about $853 in late May. Prices were around $200 one year ago.

We first outlined that hoarded supplies would begin to hit the market in late March.