SK hynix broke ground in Indiana on Thursday, and the two releases issued about the same ceremony count the jobs at 1,000 and at 7,000

Ground was broken on Thursday in West Lafayette, Indiana, for a plant that will not ship anything until the end of the decade.

SK hynix held a ceremonial groundbreaking for an advanced packaging fabrication and research facility in the Purdue Research Park. Purdue University, which hosted it, puts the project at more than $4 billion and calls it the company's first high bandwidth memory production hub in the United States. It was announced in April 2024. Indiana Governor Mike Braun, Senator Todd Young, Purdue interim president Mitch Daniels and SK hynix chief executive Kwak Noh-Jung spoke, and the company signed a partnership framework agreement with the university for research and development work on advanced packaging.

Two counts of the jobs went out the same day.

Purdue's release says the fab will support approximately 1,000 employees when production begins. Senator Young's release says SK hynix expects the project to create approximately 7,000 direct and indirect jobs through construction, operations, partner companies, and related industries. The two are measuring different things on their own faces, one counting staff at the plant and the other counting a supply chain around it, and neither document reconciles them.

The federal share

Young's release carries the money. The Commerce Department awarded SK hynix up to $458 million in direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act, which Young helped write, and up to $500 million in federal loans. Set against a project of more than $4 billion, that is under a quarter of the cost, and only if every dollar is drawn.

The same release says more than 150 materials, components, and equipment partners are discussing participation in the local supply chain. It names none of them.

What gets made there, and where

The Indiana site packages and tests. It does not grow silicon.

Cutting-edge wafers made by SK hynix in South Korea will be delivered to Indiana for advanced packaging and testing before the finished parts are supplied to American customers, according to Yonhap News Agency, which reported the ceremony from West Lafayette. Yonhap also has the schedule, which appears in neither release: the cleanroom opens by October 2028 and mass production of next-generation HBM starts in the second half of 2029. Kwak told the ceremony that volume production of HBM4E begins in the third quarter of 2029 and that the site is expected to reach an annual capacity of hundreds of thousands of wafers.

Purdue has been building the workforce side of this for four years. It launched what it calls the first comprehensive Semiconductor Degrees Program in 2022, and says more than 800 undergraduate and graduate students are now taking a semiconductor certificate or concentration or working through SCALE, its defence-sector workforce programme. The Birck Nanotechnology Center on the same campus holds 33,000 square feet of specialised laboratories and one of the largest academic cleanrooms in the country.