Chemical explosions take out SK Hynix factory

News is spreading that SK Hynix closed down a factory in Wuxi, China after a fire. The fire, which started at 3:50 p.m. local time during deployment of equipment, was extinguished by 5:20 p.m., the company said in a statement today.

TechPowerUp speculates that this may primarily impact NAND flash prices since SK Hynix recently prioritized NAND flash over DRAM for the facility, while KitGuru claims it's also bad news for NVIDIA as GDDR5 from this factory is crucial to the production of NVIDIA's high-end GeForce GTX cards.

The latter site claims production at both plant 1 and 2 was halted following huge chemical explosions, taking out about half of Hynix's capacity and roughly 15 percent of global DRAM production.

Our sources in the Far East have just told us that major memory brands have stopped shipping anything at all, until they know the full extent of the damage and how the markets will react. This makes sense.

If you are a major memory brand and your warehouses in the Far East, Europe, USA etc are all packed full of product that was destined to be sold as the ‘pre-explosion price’, why wouldn’t you wait a day or two to see just how far the memory price will jump?