A $13 billion Hong Kong ETF is now moving SK Hynix shares, the leader in AI memory

A leveraged ETF in Hong Kong on SK Hynix shares has grown to $13 billion and has begun moving the price of the company it was created to track, Bloomberg reported on July 1, 2026. The fund has reached a scale at which its daily rebalancing has become a market factor in its own right.

Why SK Hynix is called the world's top AI stock

SK Hynix is the largest maker of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which goes into AI accelerators from Nvidia, AMD and other companies. Without HBM, training and inference of large language models are not possible: Nvidia's flagship Blackwell-series chips ship with tens of gigabytes of exactly this type of memory.

The company's shares have become one of the few liquid instruments for publicly betting on the growth of AI infrastructure. The stock trades on the Korea Exchange (KOSPI), and as the AI boom has accelerated, interest from Asian investors has risen sharply, which created the ground for large derivative products.

How a $13 billion ETF began moving the market

The mechanics of a 2x leveraged ETF are simple: if the underlying asset rises 3%, the fund should rise 6%; if it falls, the fund should fall 6%. To maintain the stated leverage every trading day, the manager must rebalance the portfolio: buy more shares when the price rises or sell when it falls.

With modest assets this goes unnoticed. At $13 billion, it does not.

• Fund size: $13 billion
• Underlying asset: SK Hynix shares (KOSPI: 000660)
• Domicile: Hong Kong
• Type: leveraged ETF

At the end of each trading session, the fund has to enter the market with large orders, hundreds of millions of dollars in one direction or the other. This reinforces the price move already under way: rallies become sharper and declines deeper. The effect is especially pronounced because a significant share of SK Hynix stock is held by strategic shareholders, and the daily free float is limited.

"The fund has grown so large that it has become a driving force itself,"

Bloomberg states.

Why Hong Kong rather than buying directly on KOSPI

Hong Kong serves as a regional hub for structured products tied to shares in neighboring markets such as Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Local infrastructure lets investors in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and other regions gain exposure to a given stock without opening an account on a foreign exchange, in familiar settlement hours and currency.

A leveraged ETF is a convenient tool for retail investors who want to "bet on AI chips" without dealing in futures or options. The fund's growth to $13 billion reflects the scale of demand: betting on SK Hynix as a proxy for the entire AI sector proved more popular than any manager could have expected at launch.

What this means

The Hong Kong ETF is a clear example of how derivatives on AI stocks begin to take on a life of their own. A fund created to mirror the movement of SK Hynix has itself become a factor in that movement. For long-term investors, this means higher short-term volatility unrelated to the company's fundamentals, such as quarterly results or HBM shipment forecasts.