Memory chip giant SK Hynix was forced to close one of their factories due to a large fire today. The South Korean company reported the fire started at 3:50 pm local time in their plant in Wuxi, China. The fire was extinguished about one and half hour later. There appears to be person injured and a few being checked in hospital as a precaution. Users on a Chinese forum are concerned about air pollution with poisonous gasses coming from the fire.
SK Hynix is the second largest manufacturer of computer memory in the world. The fab was reportedly making DRAM chips, but several websites report that SK Hynix prioritized NAND memory over DRAM in the affected site. This could have an effect on SSD prices as with less NAND manufacturing capacity prices are likely to go up.
Allegedly the factory also manufactures GDDR5 memory for Nvidia video cards which could mean that graphic cards will become more expensive. As Nvidia will be looking for new suppliers this might also affect prices of other video card manufacturers that now all have to compete with each other for the less available memory.
Reports say that the loss of the factory would mean that SK Hynix loses 50% of it's entire production capacity while the company makes 30% of all memory in the world. In 2008 a SK Hynix plant in Icheon, South Korea suffered from a fire.
