Twenty-some years ago, SK Hynix was drowning in roughly 7 trillion won of liabilities, its stock scraping the floor at around 125 to 135 KRW per share.
On May 27, 2026, that same company’s shares surged as much as 14.9% intraday, pushing its market capitalization past $1 trillion and peaking near $1.12 trillion. It closed the day up 9.3%.
From the ashes to the trillion-dollar club
The catalyst is straightforward: artificial intelligence eats memory chips for breakfast, and SK Hynix makes some of the best ones on the planet. The company’s high-bandwidth memory chips, known as HBM3 and HBM3E, are essential components inside NVIDIA’s GPU-based AI accelerators.
The stock ripped roughly 1,000% over a 12-month stretch leading up to the milestone. It now ranks as approximately the 16th most valuable publicly traded firm on the planet, and one of only a handful of non-US companies to ever cross the trillion-dollar threshold.
