SEOUL (Reuters) -SK Hynix shares jumped 8.4% on Thursday morning after it said it began mass production of a 12-layer version of the latest generation of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, to meet demand from the current artificial intelligence (AI) boom.

The world's second-largest memory chipmaker said in a statement it was the world's first latest-generation HBM product, called HBM3E, with 12 layers and the largest capacity of existing HBM to date at 36 gigabytes.

SK Hynix has been the main supplier of HBM chips to Nvidia ( NVDA ) and supplied HBM3E chips in late March to a customer it declined to identify.

The benchmark South Korean stock index rose 1.7%.

(Reporting by Joyce Lee; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Muralikumar Anantharaman)