SK Hynix will mass manufacture its LPDDR6 memory with speeds of up to 14.4 Gbps, with Xiaomi as the first customer
SK Hynix will begin mass production of its memory this semester LPDDR6the next low-power mobile memory standard, according to the South Korean media Herald. In addition, Xiaomi will be the first customer to receive these chips, which will equip its next high-end mobile phone, after the company completed the development and certification of the product last March.
The generational leap seeks, above all, to improve data transfer speed without increasing consumption, something critical in a mobile phone that depends on battery. LPDDR6 will reach up to 14.4Gbps33% more than the 10.7 Gbps of LPDDR5X, the generation that until now equipped the flagships on the market.
Energy efficiency is the other axis of improvement. SK Hynix incorporates a subchannel structure that allows only the necessary memory paths to be activated at a time, instead of keeping all channels operational, together with a system of dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) that adjusts consumption according to the actual workload. The result, according to the company, is a reduction in energy expenditure of more than 20% compared to the previous generation.
The relationship between SK Hynix and Xiaomi is not new. The Korean manufacturer has supplied memory to the Chinese brand since 2013, when it started with LPDDR3 chips, and has maintained that relationship continuously until the current LPDDR5X generation. It is expected that this first deployment in Xiaomi will later be extended to other Chinese manufacturers such as Vivo or Oppo, which also depend on external memory for their high-end models.
An increasingly tense mobile memory market
Samsung and SK Hynix currently lead the mobile DRAM market, while CXMT, China’s largest memory manufacturer, has closed the gap with Micron, the third player in the sector. Samsung concentrates a good part of its supply in global Android phones, while SK Hynix maintains a particularly strong position in Chinese manufacturers. In the Chinese entry-level range, brands such as CXMT are gaining ground, but the flagship models continue to depend on the three big suppliers.
Obviously, the brutal crisis in which we are immersed and the price context add additional pressure. According to the consulting firm TrendForce, revenue from mobile DRAM grew by 64.5% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, and the forecast indicates that they will continue to rise in the second. The reason is not just demand: memory manufacturers are concentrating production capacity on conventional DRAM and HBM for AI servers, which has created bottlenecks and pushed LPDDR prices to levels close to those of standard memory.
The parallel race for the AI server market
Beyond mobile, LPDDR6 has a second increasingly relevant destination, which is SOCAMM moduleswhich package this low-power memory for AI servers. If HBM memory accompanies GPUs, LPDDR plays an equivalent role alongside CPUs, and its demand grows as the AI market shifts from training to inference.
As the source recalls, that interest was reflected in a symbolic gesture during Computex 2026, when Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, visited the SK Hynix stand and wrote by hand “I love SOCAMM” on a 192 GB module. NVIDIA recently presented its first own CPU for AI servers, a product that precisely reinforces the need for high-performance LPDDR memory in that segment.
Samsung, for its part, already presented its own version of LPDDR6 in January based on a fifth-generation 10-nanometer process, with which it won an innovation award at CES. The arrival of SK Hynix into mass production thus marks the beginning of a race that will be fought simultaneously on two fronts: that of flagship mobile phones and that of memory for infrastructure. artificial intelligence.
