When South Korean billionaire Chey Tae-won rang the Nasdaq's opening bell for SK Hynix's $26.5 billion listing on Friday, it marked the ultimate payoff of a bet many once considered risky: buying a loss-making chipmaker that has since become an artificial intelligence (AI) powerhouse.SK Group's 2012 acquisition of Hynix was viewed as problematic even within the business conglomerate: Memory chips are cyclical and capital-intensive, and the company was losing money while trailing Samsung Electronics in market share and technology.
But under Chey, seeking an edge over Samsung, SK Hynix has spent more than a decade betting on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, at the time a niche technology. The wager paid off as HBM became a critical component in Nvidia's AI accelerators, helping SK Hynix emerge as the world's biggest producer of the chip.
"This is a truly historical moment. We've been waiting for a long, long time," Chey said during an interview with CNBC on Friday. "It is a kind of dream and now it is a dream come true."
"SK is our largest memory partner. Without SK's partnership, today's AI industry would not have developed as wonderfully as it has," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told reporters in Seoul in June, with the 65-year-old Chey standing beside him.
