TLDR
- SK Hynix overtook Samsung to become South Korea’s most valuable company, reaching a market cap of nearly 2.1 quadrillion won.
- The company’s early bet on High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chips, made in 2012, is the core reason for its rise.
- SK Hynix is Nvidia’s primary HBM supplier, putting it at the heart of the AI chip boom.
- The company plans to raise $29.43 billion via an ADR listing on Nasdaq on July 10, 2026.
- Its stock has rallied more than 340% this year, with proceeds earmarked for new chip factories and equipment.
SK Hynix has officially surpassed Samsung Electronics to become South Korea’s most valuable listed company — a result 14 years in the making.
The chipmaker reached a market cap of nearly 2.1 quadrillion won this week. That’s a number SK Group’s own chairman once set as a long-term target, and it arrived faster than almost anyone expected.
The stock has surged more than 340% this year alone.
The story starts in 2012, when SK Group acquired Hynix Semiconductor in a deal that drew widespread skepticism. Standard & Poor’s assigned SK Telecom a negative outlook over the purchase, citing the cyclical nature of semiconductors.
At the time, Samsung was worth more than 10 times SK Hynix.
Rather than compete head-on in commodity DRAM, SK Hynix placed a bet on High-Bandwidth Memory — a niche chip that moved data fast but had limited demand at the time.
“We believed that it would be impossible to overcome Samsung in commodity DRAM products,” said Hyun Sun-yeop, a former SK Hynix HR executive. “We were desperate to change the market dynamics.”
The HBM Gamble
SK Hynix launched the world’s first HBM product with AMD in 2014. But the second generation stumbled, and Samsung pulled ahead in the late 2010s. There were internal debates about whether to abandon HBM development entirely.
They didn’t. The company doubled down, investing 880 billion won into a packaging facility in Icheon and ramping up capacity in anticipation of demand from Nvidia — then still best known as a gaming graphics chip maker.
That facility sat underutilized in 2019 as demand from Nvidia and crypto miners dropped off.
“It was a headache back in 2019,” said Shim Dae-yong, who led HBM development at the company. “It was obsolete.”
Then ChatGPT launched in 2022. The AI boom exploded demand for HBM chips, which became critical to Nvidia’s AI accelerators used in data centers. SK Hynix was ready.
“No one expected the HBM market would post such explosive growth,” Shim said. “But we were ready in terms of performance and capacity.”
The ADR Listing
SK Hynix is now moving to broaden its investor base further. The company announced plans on Wednesday to raise 45.45 trillion won — roughly $29.43 billion — through an American Depositary Receipt listing on Nasdaq, targeted for July 10, 2026.
The proceeds will go toward building a chip factory in Yongin, an advanced packaging fab in Cheongju, and purchasing Extreme Ultraviolet Scanner equipment.
SK Hynix briefly overtook Samsung as the world’s top DRAM maker in 2025, following a record operating profit in 2024 — a sharp turnaround from the 7.73 trillion won operating loss it posted in 2023 during a brutal industry downturn.
Samsung is now playing catch-up. Its in-house foundry supplies components for HBM chips, while SK Hynix uses TSMC to produce its base die.
SK Hynix’s market cap on Monday hit nearly 2.1 quadrillion won. SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won had set that figure as a target. It arrived on Monday.
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