The US Department of Commerce has awarded SK Hynix $458 million in direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act.

The funding is a slight increase on the $450 million that the government proposed to award the memory chip maker in April 2024.

In a statement, the department said the funding would support the $3.87 billion investment SK Hynix has pledged to make in West Lafayette, Indiana, to establish a high-bandwidth memory (HBM) advanced packaging fabrication and research and development (R&D) facility.

Mass production at the plant is expected in the second half of 2028 and the Department of Commerce said the funding will be dispersed based on the company's completion of project milestones.

In addition to producing next-generation HBM, the site will also function as an R&D facility for AI products, with SK Hynix planning to collaborate with Purdue University and Ivy Tech Community College to develop training programs and a new curriculum to help cultivate a talent pipeline in the region.

“With this investment in SK Hynix – the world’s leading producer of high-bandwidth memory chips – and their partnership with Purdue University, we are solidifying America’s AI hardware supply chain in a way no other country on Earth can match, creating hundreds of jobs in Indiana, and ensuring the Hoosier State plays an important role in advancing U.S. economic and national security,” said US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo.

SK Hynix is the sixth company to have finalized its CHIPS Act funding agreement with the outgoing Biden administration following TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Intel, Micron, and GlobalWafers.

Despite Biden’s attempts to secure these agreements in his administration's dying days, the future of the CHIPS Act is now uncertain as the US and the world gear up for a second Trump presidency.

In the run-up to the election, President-elect Trump criticized the CHIPS and Science Act, saying that the government should have levied tariffs on the semiconductor industry instead of handing out grants and loans to chip companies.

In other chip news:

• Networking chip startup Enfabrica has raised $115 million as part of an oversubscribed equity financing round. The company also unveiled its upcoming accelerated compute fabric of ACF SuperNIC chip which Enfabrica claims will deliver 4x the bandwidth and multipath resiliency of other network interface controllers.
• Open networking software startup Aviz Networks has raised $17 million from a Series A round which saw participation from Cisco Investments, Moment Ventures Inc., and Qualcomm Ventures. Founded in 2019, the company specializes in developing AI-driven networking solutions for data centers and Edge networks.
• Chip startup MatX raised $80 million in a Series B funding round which valued the company at $300 million. Founded by former Google LLC engineers in 2022, the company is developing chips for training AI models and performing inference.
• D-Matrix has launched an accelerator card designed to manage AI inference workloads quicker and more efficiently. The company told SiliconANGLE that the Peripheral Component Interconnect card will run alongside Nvidia’s GPUs and will be able to manage low-latency batches of data for use cases such as generative AI video creation.
• Quantum component manufacturer Infleqtion has secured $11 million from the US Department of Defense under the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) program. The funding will support the company’s Rack Mounted Optical Clocks project which is being used to drive advancements in precision timing solutions, enhance military operational readiness, and secure communications.
• Akash Systems has been awarded a $27 million contract from NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies to provide NxtGen with its Diamond cooling servers. Akash Systems will deploy the servers in NxtGen’s data centers in India.
• French DNA data startup Biomemory has secured $18 million in a Series A funding round. The company said it intends to use the funds to complete the development of its first-generation data storage appliance, grow its workforce, and accelerate the commercialization of its offering.