Report: Solidigm Weighs U.S. NAND Fab in New York

Solidigm is considering building a NAND flash manufacturing facility in the United States, with upstate New York emerging as a leading candidate, according to a September 18 Reuters report citing three people familiar with the discussions. Solidigm is the U.S.-based NAND and enterprise-SSD subsidiary of SK hynix.

The proposal is not a finalized factory plan. SK hynix told Reuters that Solidigm is reviewing options to strengthen its business competitiveness but that no specific plans have been confirmed. Reuters also reports that no agreement has been reached and that important project details remain under discussion.

The New York report is distinct from the exploratory discussions between SK hynix and Intel that surfaced earlier this week. Those talks involve possible memory production at Intel’s Ohio site, including scenarios such as leasing manufacturing space or creating a joint venture. SK hynix has publicly said that no arrangement with Intel has been finalized.

Reuters says the potential Solidigm project would instead be a NAND facility of its own in the United States. That makes the two stories related through SK hynix’s broader U.S. manufacturing options, but they should not be merged into one supposed investment plan. Neither has reached a confirmed construction commitment.

Solidigm was created after SK hynix acquired Intel’s NAND and SSD business. The transaction included Intel’s NAND manufacturing facility in Dalian, China, and Solidigm has since continued as a major supplier of enterprise SSDs. Reuters describes Dalian as Solidigm’s sole NAND production facility, making geographic diversification one of the clearest strategic implications of a U.S. fab.

That matters because NAND manufacturing location now intersects with trade policy and access to semiconductor equipment as well as ordinary supply-chain resilience. Reuters reports that a U.S. site could reduce exposure to potential tariffs and restrictions affecting equipment exports to China. Those are strategic possibilities, not evidence that a New York fab would automatically manufacture NAND more cheaply than Dalian.

Solidigm has increasingly positioned high-capacity enterprise SSDs as part of AI data-center infrastructure. The company said in August that AI-driven storage demand and industry supply constraints have become larger than many expected. Reuters likewise links the current manufacturing discussions to heavy memory demand from AI data centers.

That context helps explain why NAND capacity is receiving attention, but it does not turn the reported project into a consumer-storage forecast. Enterprise SSD demand, fab utilization, product mix, yields and customer qualification all affect how new wafer capacity ultimately flows through the market.

A genuinely new high-volume NAND fab would be more consequential for global supply than an assembly site or an R&D line because it would add front-end flash-memory manufacturing capacity. But the current evidence stops well before that point: Solidigm has not announced a site, budget, capacity or production schedule.

The useful milestones to watch are a formal investment decision, government or local incentive agreement, site acquisition, construction timetable, equipment orders and an eventual production ramp. Until those appear, the New York possibility should be treated as a strategic manufacturing option rather than as evidence that SSD supply or retail pricing is about to change.