By Adam Clark
Intel has just made a big-name hire, bringing in former SK Hynix CEO Seok-Hee Lee. While that might generate some speculation about a move to rival Micron Technology in memory chips, investors should probably focus on Intel's chip-packaging plans.
Intel said late Thursday that it had appointed Lee as executive vice president of Intel Foundry, its chip-manufacturing business, reporting directly to CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
Lee previously led South Korean memory-chip maker SK Hynix. At one point Intel was a world leader in memory chips -- now arguably the hottest sector in the artificial-intelligence trade -- but gradually exited the business, and in fact agreed to sell the remainder of its flash-memory business to SK Hynix in 2020.
Lee's appointment is unlikely to signal a return to the memory business for Intel. Instead, it looks like a move to strengthen its chip-packaging expertise. Intel said Lee will lead advanced packaging, system integration and back-end manufacturing.
"Seok-Hee's insights will help Intel further strengthen our system integration capabilities," said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan in a statement Thursday. "He is the right leader to build and scale this critical part of the Intel Foundry business as we prepare to ramp advanced packaging technologies, including EMIB-T...to high volume for customers and partners."
Still, Lee's previous experience at SK Hynix might be important for another reason. Intel was recently reported to be in talks with SK Hynix about integrating high-bandwidth memory and logic chips, according to a report from ZDNet Korea.
A deal with SK Hynix would be significant validation for Intel's embedded multi-die interconnect Bridge, or EMIB, technology. Intel has been promoting the packaging technology as a rival to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, or CoWoS.
Intel stock has risen more than 500% in the past 12 months, and much of that excitement is based on expectations its Foundry unit can finally attract external customers to offset the billions of losses the company has booked on its chip-manufacturing operations. Wall Street analysts think chip packaging is a key part of that, offering a low-risk way for clients to begin working with Intel.
"Assuming Intel can make packaging scale reliably, we believe it can become a notable customer acquisition channel for the broader foundry platform by giving Intel just a shot of momentum," wrote D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria in a recent research note.
Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com
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June 19, 2026 10:17 ET (14:17 GMT)
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