"Restart the game", the leading city in Northeast China has finally been waiting for this moment.
Dalian is presented with an opportunity to "restart from scratch".
It is reported that recently, SK Hynix, the global giant in AI storage, has resumed the construction of Plant 2 at its NAND flash production base in Dalian, China. The new production line is planned to process 50,000 mature process wafers per month, with mass production expected in the first half of 2027. After being put into operation, it will increase the overall production capacity of the Dalian base by 50%.
This super factory, which was once silent due to the downward cycle of the industry, has been restarted at the moment when the AI wave drives industrial explosion, and it is also expected to help Dalian redefine its own position on the global industrial map.
As the first city in Northeast China with a GDP exceeding one trillion yuan, Dalian once fell into the dilemma of petrochemical industry transformation, while the new generation information technology industry represented by semiconductors is regarded as the most promising breakthrough.
Now, the restart of the factory that has been put on hold for four years not only means the return of production capacity, but also will drive the upstream and downstream of the supply chain to accelerate agglomeration, accumulating momentum for the industry to take off again. But for Dalian, the test of whether it can reshape the industrial ecology and development momentum through this opportunity has just begun.
01 Restart
Back in 2007, Intel's first chip factory in Asia was settled in Dalian, marking the start of Dalian's "ice-breaking journey" in the integrated circuit industry; in 2015, Intel set another important coordinate in China's advanced NAND (non-volatile storage) manufacturing map in this city.
The "Intel Effect" also inspired Dalian's ambition, and it once put forward the goal of "building a world-class integrated circuit industrial base".
In 2021, SK Hynix acquired Intel's NAND business, established the flash memory subsidiary Solidigm, and took over Dalian Plant 1 and related factory areas; in May of the following year, the construction of Plant 2 was launched immediately.
Image source: Shetuwang_500973006
But after that, the NAND market continued to be sluggish, coupled with the uncertainty of export control, the Dalian Plant 2 project was put on hold. Until this restart, the Dalian factory ushered in an opportunity for production capacity expansion ——
It is reported that SK Hynix plans to introduce semiconductor production equipment before the end of this year and officially put into production in the first half of next year. It is understood that the wafer throughput of the new production line is about 50,000 pieces per month. If added to the existing monthly production capacity of 100,000 wafers at Dalian Plant 1, the total local production capacity in Dalian will increase by about 50%.
This capacity expansion is actually a reflection of the explosion in AI storage demand. Omdia predicts that the average annual growth rate of market demand for DRAM and NAND Flash will reach 19% from 2025 to 2030. SK Hynix judges that storage chips are being upgraded from ordinary components to core infrastructure that determines AI performance, entering a stage of structural growth.
This is also the core logic of the current era of "storage power". From a national perspective, China's NAND industry is almost a pattern of three cities standing side by side: Xi'an, Dalian and Wuhan, corresponding to Samsung, SK Hynix and Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd. respectively, all of which are currently promoting capacity expansion.
According to Counterpoint Research data, in the second quarter of 2026, in terms of NAND flash market shipment share, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Yangtze Memory accounted for 25%, 22%, and 14% respectively. Yangtze Memory's share entered the top three for the first time, slightly surpassing Kioxia, while Micron ranked fifth.
The reshaping of this growth pattern is exactly the opportunity for cities to achieve industrial breakthroughs.
Over the past two decades, Dalian has taken Intel and SK Hynix as anchors to form a relatively complete industrial supporting ecosystem. Now, the large-scale capacity expansion of leading enterprises will not only support the leap in output value, but also further drive the agglomeration and development of upstream and downstream of the industrial chain such as semiconductor equipment, materials, packaging and testing.
Obviously, Dalian also places high hopes on SK Hynix. This year's Dalian municipal government work report emphasized that it is necessary to focus on promoting the construction of projects such as SK Hynix Phase III, promote foreign enterprises including SK Hynix to expand reproduction and increase capital, and attract more investment through the "chain leader driving the whole industrial chain" mechanism.
This capacity expansion will also become a new anchor point for Dalian's semiconductor industry.
02 Features
On the national map of integrated circuit industry, Dalian is a city with distinct characteristics.
Not long ago, when the Dalian Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology responded to the proposal on building a semiconductor industrial chain in Liaoning through Shenyang-Dalian coordination, it showed its own "industrial assets" ——
Nearly 40 semiconductor enterprises including SK Hynix and upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain have been gathered, forming a differentiated industrial pattern with prominent characteristics of memory chip manufacturing and coordinated development of materials and equipment. In 2025, the industrial output value reached 24.3 billion yuan, and a total of 8 national-level specialized and sophisticated "little giant" enterprises including Jiafeng, Kelide, Huabang Chemical and Datuo Precision have been cultivated.
Similar to the situation that Xi'an is closely connected with Samsung and Micron, the story of mutual achievement between Dalian, Intel and SK Hynix is also widely known.
But objectively speaking, the scale of Dalian's semiconductor industry is relatively small, and there is still a big gap with cities such as Wuxi, Xi'an and Wuhan, but its dependence on a single chain leader is even deeper.
According to public reports, the annual output value of SK Hynix Semiconductor (Dalian) Co., Ltd. exceeds 15 billion yuan, which is roughly estimated to account for more than 60% of the city's semiconductor industry, making it an undisputed core engine.
This means that any adjustment of SK Hynix in Dalian will trigger a huge chain reaction in the industry.
Image source: Shetuwang_500625850
To a certain extent, Dalian is similar to Xi'an, both adopting the cluster development path of "foreign leading enterprises + supporting facilities". However, Xi'an has gradually formed three pillars of memory, packaging and testing, and silicon wafers, while Dalian obviously relies more on memory, and its industrial ecology needs to be further improved.
More importantly, the divergence between Xi'an's economy and foreign trade in the first half of this year has sounded a warning for Dalian's development path. Statistics show that in the first half of the year, Xi'an's total import and export value increased by 96.2% year-on-year, but its GDP growth rate was only 1.1% in the same period.
Behind this, processing trade is still the growth engine of Xi'an's foreign trade, and the import and export of foreign enterprises represented by Samsung and Micron account for nearly 80% of the total. Some people believe that Xi'an is more like a semiconductor "production workshop", which imports a large amount of raw materials and then exports them on a large scale after processing, expanding the total volume of foreign trade, but what the local area earns is mainly processing fees.
For Xi'an and Dalian, how to make use of the technology spillover of foreign leading enterprises and the coordinated driving of supporting industries to truly cultivate a locally rooted semiconductor industrial ecology is still the core proposition that must be faced.
03 Coordination
Expanding the vision to the entire Northeast China, Dalian, located at the "tip" of the Liaodong Peninsula, is an important key node.
The outline of Liaoning's 15th Five-Year Plan emphasizes that it is necessary to give full play to the leading role of the "dual cores" of Shenyang and Dalian, support the two cities to accelerate the expansion of economic aggregate and improve development quality, and act as the "high jump team" for the comprehensive revitalization of Northeast China.
In the first half of this year, Liaoning's GDP reached 1,622.72 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 2.5%. The GDP of Shenyang and Dalian was 443.01 billion yuan and 491.85 billion yuan respectively, with year-on-year growth rates of 2.2% and 5.1%. Between the different growth rates, the role of Dalian has become increasingly prominent.
As the only trillion-yuan city in Northeast China, Dalian has formed a stable industrial foundation. The scale of the green petrochemical industrial cluster is stable at the level of 400 billion yuan, the output value of the ship and marine engineering equipment industry reaches 80 billion yuan, and the output value of high-end bearings, CNC machine tools and advanced rail transit equipment reaches 58 billion yuan.
Of course, Dalian's growth also has hidden worries. As one of the seven major petrochemical industrial bases in China, Dalian's petrochemical industry accounted for 40% of the industry in 2025. The dual dilemmas of the city's industrial structure dominated by a single industry and the petrochemical industry's "heavy oil head, small chemical tail" still exist.
On the one hand, Dalian continues to expand the advantageous industrial clusters of "petrochemical industry as the mainstay, automobile and shipbuilding accelerating development, bearings, machine tools and rail transit achieving self-improvement", and on the other hand, it vigorously cultivates emerging industries of "information enabling, energy renewal, low-altitude economy making efforts, and promising future". Among them, the new generation information technology industry has formed a cluster scale of 200 billion yuan.
The semiconductor industry led by SK Hynix is exactly the key puzzle in this sector. However, against the background of increasingly complex external environment, Dalian cannot rely solely on the efforts of one enterprise to cultivate a locally rooted industrial ecology, and it is even more inseparable from inter-regional collaborative division of labor and factor flow.
From the perspective of the outside world, the coordinated breakthrough between Dalian and Shenyang to jointly expand the industrial cluster may be a more practically feasible path.
As one of the three major domestic bases for the localization of integrated circuit equipment, Shenyang's semiconductor industry is strong in equipment and components, and has "single champion" enterprises such as Tuojing Technology, Core Source Micro, and Fortech. This misplaced and complementary industrial pattern just provides coordination space for Dalian.
According to the disclosure of Dalian Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology, Dalian has organized core industrial chain enterprises such as SK Hynix, Kelide, Hengkun New Materials, Yida Precision, and Jiafeng to carry out technical seminars and supply-demand docking with relevant enterprises in Shenyang, and gradually established the "Liaoning Semiconductor Supporting Enterprise Capability Library" covering key products such as chip manufacturing, electronic chemicals, sealing rings, and precision components.
This will also promote Dalian to shift from "unipolar dependence" to actively integrating into the regional semiconductor ecology. For Liaoning, the coordinated efforts of the two places are also a strategic opportunity to promote the transformation from "point-like layout" to "chain-like collaboration".
In May this year, the main leaders of the Liaoning Provincial Party Committee and the provincial government put forward clear expectations when meeting the delegation of well-known entrepreneurs on investment inspection, hoping that "we will work together to improve the development level of Liaoning's semiconductor industry, actively layout and land more projects, and jointly improve the industrial chain ecosystem".
This article is from the WeChat official account "City Evolution", Author: DAN Zhongkui, published with authorization from 36Kr.