SK Hynix is broadening its NAND flash expansion strategy around Dalian in China and Cheongju in South Korea as AI inference workloads increase the importance of storage in data-center architecture. Industry sources say construction of the second fab in Dalian, halted for four years, has fully resumed, with production lines planned for 40,000 to 60,000 wafers a month, equipment move-in targeted around year-end and mass production expected in the first half of next year. Together with the existing first fab, Dalian would reach about 150,000 wafers of monthly capacity. The company is also building Cheongju into its core advanced NAND hub. SK Hynix plans to invest 19.1 trillion won in the M17 site, where the first cleanroom is scheduled to open by the end of 2028 and output is expected to include next-generation high-layer-count NAND and High-Bandwidth Flash, or HBF. With four fabs including M17, Cheongju could eventually reach as much as 400,000 wafers a month, while Dalian and Cheongju together would provide about 550,000 wafers of monthly input capacity once fully built out. The investment reflects a shift in AI systems, where NAND is moving from a supporting component near GPUs and CPUs to a more central part of storage infrastructure, including Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin platform, HBF products and CXL memory pools. SK Hynix is also weighing broader supply-chain expansion. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said last month, during the listing of SK Hynix's American Depositary Receipts, that the company is reviewing candidate sites for new memory fabs worldwide, including in the U.S. The company is already building a roughly $4 billion advanced packaging plant in West Lafayette, Indiana, and is accelerating funding through its ADR listing and a review of asset sales. The move comes as Micron presses its U.S. manufacturing advantage. Sumit Sadana, Micron's Chief Business Officer, said the company remains the only manufacturer operating a memory front-end fab in the United States and that U.S.-made memory carries a price premium under long-term supply agreements.