SK Hynix became trillion-dollar company amid AI boom

South Korean SK Hynix, a memory chip manufacturer, has become a company with a market capitalization of one trillion dollars and became the second most valuable public issuer in South Korea — second only to Samsung Electronics, Bloomberg reports.

How the company reached second place in the country

Two decades ago, SK Hynix was struggling for survival: the company was repeatedly on the brink of bankruptcy, experienced changes in ownership, and remained a secondary player in the memory market until the 2010s, behind Samsung and Micron Technology. Today it surpasses in market capitalization almost all South Korean corporations except Samsung Electronics — and this despite the fact that relatively recently investors did not even consider SK Hynix a first-tier company on a national scale.

• SK Hynix is a manufacturer of DRAM and NAND flash chips
• The company entered the ranks of South Korea's largest public issuers, taking second place
• Two decades ago it was in a crisis state
• By market capitalization it lags only behind Samsung Electronics
• Part of the SK Group conglomerate

Why memory suddenly became the main commodity of the AI era

The main driver of the revaluation is not consumer electronics, but data centers for artificial intelligence. SK Hynix is one of the key suppliers of HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) chips, which are installed in AI accelerators like Nvidia H100, H200 and Blackwell: without fast memory next to the processor, training and inference of large language models hit a bandwidth bottleneck. Demand from hyperscalers for servers for generative AI has driven prices and memory supplies in general, not just HBM, which has been reflected in the company's revenue and valuation.

SK Hynix is part of the SK Group conglomerate and for a long time was perceived by investors as a cyclical, secondary business against the backdrop of rises and falls in memory prices — the DRAM and NAND market historically goes through phases of shortage and overproduction at intervals of several years. The AI infrastructure boom changed this logic: memory manufacturers turned out to be no less critical a link in the AI supply chain than chip developers and model creators themselves, and the demand for HBM turned out to be so high that production capacity is booked by customers years in advance.

How this changes the balance of power in the industry

Before the AI boom, the trio of memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix and American Micron Technology — competed primarily on price for standard chips for smartphones, laptops and general-purpose servers. HBM is more complex: these are multi-layer memory stacks connected to the processor through through-silicon via technology, and manufacturing such chips requires more sophisticated technological expertise than mass memory production. SK Hynix was one of the first to bet on this direction, and now is reaping the benefits: contracts with AI accelerator manufacturers have turned a once-secondary player into one of the most expensive technology companies in Asia.

What this means

The history of SK Hynix shows that the artificial intelligence boom redistributes capitalization not only among model developers and GPU manufacturers, but also in far less visible links in the supply chain — memory manufacturers, without which AI accelerators simply cannot operate at full capacity.