SK Hynix becomes a trillion-dollar company amid the AI boom

South Korean memory chipmaker SK Hynix has become a trillion-dollar company and the second most valuable publicly traded company in South Korea, behind only Samsung Electronics, Bloomberg reports.

How did the company reach second place in the country?

Two decades ago, SK Hynix was fighting for survival. The company came close to bankruptcy several times, went through changes in ownership, and until the 2010s remained a secondary player in the memory market behind Samsung and Micron Technology. Today its market capitalization exceeds that of nearly every South Korean corporation except Samsung Electronics. Not long ago, investors did not consider SK Hynix a top-tier company on a national scale at all.

• SK Hynix makes DRAM and NAND flash chips
• The company has joined the ranks of South Korea's largest public companies, taking second place
• Two decades ago, it was in crisis
• By market capitalization, it trails only Samsung Electronics
• It is part of the SK Group conglomerate

Why has memory suddenly become the key commodity of the AI era?

The main driver of the revaluation is not consumer electronics but AI data centers. SK Hynix is one of the key suppliers of HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) chips, which go into AI accelerators such as the Nvidia H100, H200, and Blackwell. Without fast memory next to the processor, training and inference for large language models hit a bandwidth bottleneck. Hyperscaler demand for generative AI servers has pushed up memory prices and shipments across the board, not just for HBM, and that has shown up in the company's revenue and valuation.

SK Hynix is part of the SK Group conglomerate, and for a long time investors viewed it as a cyclical, second-tier business exposed to swings in memory prices. The DRAM and NAND market has historically cycled between shortages and oversupply every few years. The AI infrastructure boom changed that logic: memory makers turned out to be no less critical to the AI supply chain than the chip and model developers themselves, and demand for HBM has been so high that customers are booking production capacity years in advance.

How does this shift the balance of power in the industry?

Before the AI boom, the big three memory makers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and US-based Micron Technology — competed mainly on price for commodity chips used in smartphones, laptops, and general-purpose servers. HBM is more complex: it consists of stacked layers of memory connected to the processor through through-silicon vias, and making these chips requires more refined engineering expertise than mass-market memory. SK Hynix was one of the first to bet on this segment, and it is now reaping the rewards: contracts with AI accelerator makers have turned a once-secondary player into one of Asia's most valuable tech companies.

What does this mean?

The SK Hynix story shows that the AI boom is redistributing market value not only among model developers and GPU makers but also across far less visible links in the supply chain — memory makers, without whom AI accelerators simply cannot run at full capacity.