Twenty years ago, SK Hynix was drowning in debt and teetering on the edge of collapse. On June 22, 2026, it briefly overtook Samsung Electronics to become South Korea’s most valuable publicly traded company.
SK Hynix’s market capitalization hit approximately $1.35 trillion, or roughly 2,082.5 trillion won, nudging past Samsung’s 2,081.3 trillion won in intraday trading. The chipmaker’s shares surged over 5.7% on the day, dragging the broader KOSPI index upward with it.
The AI memory chip gold rush
The engine behind this reversal of fortune has a name: high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. These are the specialized chips that power the GPUs running AI workloads in data centers worldwide.
SK Hynix commands roughly 57% of HBM revenue in recent quarters, making it the dominant supplier for Nvidia’s AI accelerators. Samsung and Micron, its two main competitors, have been playing catch-up.
