SEOUL, April 25 (Reuters) - South Korea's SK Hynix on Thursday posted its highest profit in nearly two years, as explosive sales of its advanced DRAM chips such as high bandwidth memory (HBM) used in generative AI chipsets drove a sharp performance improvement.

The world's second-biggest memory chipmaker and Nvidia supplier reported a 2.89 trillion won ($2.1 billion) operating profit for the January-March quarter versus a loss of 3.4 trillion won a year earlier.

It beat expectations for a 1.88 trillion won operating profit LSEG SmartEstimate which is weighted toward analysts who are more consistently accurate.

The result marks its second-highest profit for the January-March quarter ever, and a quick turnaround from heavy losses it incurred for a year until the third quarter of 2023 when the global memory chip sector went through its worst downturn in decades, hit by a slump in post-pandemic demand for tech devices.

Revenue rose 114% on-year to 12.4 trillion won. ($1 = 1,374.6200 won) (Reporting by Joyce Lee and Heekyong Yang; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Kim Coghill)