Laid off from SK hynix.

What SK hynix layoffs have meant for employees

If you work for an SK hynix company in the United States, the name on a layoff listing may not be the one you'd search for. Solidigm's 2023 layoffs appear in California's WARN report under SK hynix NAND Product Solutions Corp., doing business as Solidigm, and the 2025 cuts appear in the following year's report under SK hynix America Inc., at the same White Rock Road address in Rancho Cordova and at a San Jose office on North First Street. A search for Solidigm alone would miss those 2025 listings. Each of those listings is marked permanent, unlike the six-month shutdown Hynix announced in Eugene in 2001. Solidigm's staff came over from Intel's NAND business unit, AnandTech reported, with Intel transferring some of its NAND employees when SK hynix took over the SSD business in late 2021.

The explanations reported for the 2001, 2008 and 2023 cuts all came back to the memory market, from the DRAM oversupply Hynix's chairman cited in 2001, per EE Times, to the weak market Cleanroom Technology says the company cited in 2008 and the prolonged downturn Solidigm named in 2023. The slump that year ran deep. Revenue at the US NAND unit that includes Solidigm fell 53.6 percent in 2023's first half and its net loss grew to 2.2 trillion won, JoongAng Daily reported, citing a semi-annual business report. Flash was recovering more slowly than DRAM, which AI demand was lifting, and SK hynix had announced further NAND production cuts, with Omdia expecting the flash market to shrink 27.2 percent that year. SK hynix itself posted a third-quarter net loss of 2.185 trillion won, AnandTech noted on the day of the October cut. The voluntary retirement program SK hynix System IC offered its Korean staff in December 2024 appeared tied to low-price competition from Chinese companies and a long slowdown, Asia Business Daily reported.

Solidigm's 2023 cuts came a year after a hiring pitch. Its officials said in 2022 that the Rancho Cordova campus would employ 1,900 people, many of them former Intel workers, and add 750 jobs over five years, The Sacramento Bee reported, and Solidigm had more than 2,000 employees in 20 locations that September, by AnandTech's count. In July 2023, as part of the same downsizing, Solidigm shut its Korean sales unit, and JoongAng Daily quoted SK hynix as saying agencies would handle Korean sales from then on. The October cut appeared to involve business, management, marketing and sales roles, AnandTech wrote. If you went job hunting around Sacramento after one of those cuts, you were looking in a region where, by one analyst's reading of state notices for most of 2023, Intel's Folsom layoffs and Solidigm's together made tech the top layoff sector, the Bee reported.

Eugene's 2001 shutdown was pitched as a pause. Idling the plant took half of Hynix's 64-megabit DRAM output and 16 percent of its total DRAM production offline. The company planned to spend about $150 million upgrading the idle fab to make 256-megabit chips, and its chairman said the spending showed commitment to the plant and to "our loyal employees," as EE Times reported. After the 2008 decision, Mayor Kitty Piercy said the company still wanted a long-term relationship with Eugene and was talking with potential partners about what the building might be used for, KVAL reported. The plant's payroll had run to $62 million a year, and county records showed Hynix as Lane County's second-biggest taxpayer, paying about $4.7 million in property taxes. Cleanroom Technology says Stratacache bought the site in 2020.

In each of the three California rounds, about two months separated the notice date from the effective date, eight weeks in 2025's case. If your job at the Rancho Cordova campus or the San Jose office ended, filing in California is covered at California unemployment benefits, and how COBRA works answers the health-insurance questions.