While the rest of the industry scrambles to keep up with demand, the Korean firm is working on a new memory technology called High-Bandwidth Storage (HBS). It’s supposed to supercharge local AI processing by mashing together DRAM and NAND Flash into a single vertically stacked nightmare for chip designers.

Multiple Korean sources claim that HBS builds on SK hynix’s previous High Bandwidth Flash and shoves it into mobile form factors. That means your future smartphone might come with a memory sandwich stacked 16 layers high, bonded by a tech the company calls vertical fan-out, or VFO.

SK hynix first wheeled out VFO in 2023, stuffing it into Apple's disastrous Vision Pro. Unlike traditional curved interconnects, VFO uses vertical wires, which the company claims are 4.6 times more efficient at electron transfer. That’s supposed to mean a 4.9 per cent power gain, 1.4 per cent better cooling, and a 27 per cent reduction in thickness.

With HBS, SK hynix adds NAND Flash to the VFO pile, making the design even more ambitious. Unlike its High Bandwidth Flash tech, which it’s jointly fiddling with SanDisk, this one doesn’t bother with through-silicon vias. That’s a win for manufacturing yield and cost, two things the memory world usually gets wrong in the first few tries.

Apparently, the DRAM+NAND design will be slapped directly onto the application processor, which means more raw power sitting right next to your smartphone’s brain. In theory, that should help with on-device AI, but don’t hold your breath just yet.

SK hynix plans to show off HBS memory properly between 2029 and 2031, which leaves plenty of time for someone to muck it up. In the meantime, it's already sweating to meet chip orders for 2026.