Two AI memory rallies, one country, and a market cap chart that has gone up 9x in two years. If SK Hynix crosses the threshold, South Korea becomes the first country outside the US to host two trillion-dollar companies at the same time.
SK Hynix is roughly $50bn away from a trillion-dollar market capitalisation. Its shares closed Wednesday with a market value around $948bn, up more than 200% so far this year and 274% across 2025, on the same trade that has lifted nearly every name with high-bandwidth memory on its product page.
The benchmark figure is the one the company sits next to. Samsung Electronics crossed $1tn on 6 May, becoming only the second Asian company to do so after TSMC, on the day the KOSPI broke 7,000 for the first time. If SK Hynix follows, South Korea becomes the first country outside the US to host two trillion-dollar companies at the same time, a sentence that would have read as a category error two years ago.
The driver is no longer hypothetical. SK Hynix is the world’s largest supplier of high-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM that sits next to the GPU on AI accelerators and which Nvidia, Google, and AMD now order in volumes the industry has not had to plan for before.
The company’s CFO confirmed in October that its 2026 HBM supply was already sold out, and executives have since flagged a likely shortage running into 2027.
The next-generation product is where the share math gets steep. SK Hynix is expected to supply about two-thirds of Nvidia’s HBM4 demand for the Vera Rubin platform, with mass production having started in February and the company’s HBM4 share of revenue projected to overtake HBM3E from Q3. Samsung is the credible second source. Micron is third. There is no fourth.
The Q1 numbers gave the rally a balance sheet to point at. Revenue in the three months to March nearly tripled year on year and crossed 50 trillion won for the first time, the kind of single-quarter print that resets the company’s earnings multiple before the analyst notes can catch up.
Some perspective on the scale of the re-rate. SK Hynix was valued below $100bn less than two years ago. It now sits near the market caps of Walmart and Berkshire
Hathaway, a comparison Reuters surfaced and which is striking less for what it says about SK Hynix than for what it says about how the AI compute stack is pricing the layer underneath the chip.
That layer is the structural argument. The GPU is the visible product of the AI build-out; HBM is the invisible one. As inference workloads scale, memory bandwidth, not raw compute, becomes the binding constraint for an increasing share of deployments.
Big Tech’s $725bn 2026 capex run has to come out somewhere in the memory bill of materials, and HBM is where it concentrates.
The risks are well-rehearsed and have not yet bitten. SK Hynix is still cyclical, still dependent on a small number of very large customers, and still operating in a market where Samsung’s catch-up on HBM4 yield is a quarterly question.
Memory shortages and price hikes work in the company’s favour today; an HBM4 production stumble would be the first scenario where they did not.
What the market is pricing, however, is the next two years rather than the next cycle. At $948bn, SK Hynix is no longer a memory company that benefits from AI. It is being valued as the structural counterparty to it.
