SEOUL: SK Hynix Inc has surged past a US$1 trillion market valuation after its shares soared more than 900% in the past year, reflecting investor confidence in its position as the leading supplier of advanced memory chips powering artificial intelligence (AI).
Shares of SK Hynix, Nvidia Corp’s top supplier of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), climbed as much as 11% yesterday, making it the third Asian company to join the US$1 trillion club after South Korean peer Samsung Electronics Co hit the mark earlier this month. The Kospi index jumped 5%.
SK Hynix sits at the chokepoint of the global AI buildout. Memory chips have emerged as a critical bottleneck determining how quickly data centres can expand capacity.
Investors and analysts expect memory chip shortages to last through 2027, giving SK Hynix and rivals Samsung and Micron Technology Inc unusual pricing power over the world’s largest technology companies. Micron’s value also surged above US$1 trillion this week.
“We expect SK Hynix to remain the leader on” high-bandwidth memory, Barclays analysts including Simon Coles wrote in a note earlier this month.
They added that product pricing is expected to remain favourable, with supply tightness to continue. A potential listing of SK Hynix’s shares in the United States was also highlighted as a catalyst.
Even with their rapid ascent this year, SK Hynix shares trade at six times one-year forward earnings, compared with 27 times for the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index.
“Judging by earnings power alone, it’s difficult to predict a near-term peak,” said Cha So-Yoon, an equity investment manager at Taurus Asset Management in Seoul.
“Even if investors don’t assign Big Tech-style multiples of 20 times, many are eyeing up to 10 times earnings as a near-term upside.”
In April, SK Hynix reported a five-fold jump in quarterly profit, while anticipating that HBM demand will exceed supply in the next three years.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, SK Hynix had retained 57% of global HBM market share by revenue, Counterpoint Research’s data showed. Samsung and Micron followed with 22% and 21%, respectively.
Meanwhile, SK Hynix has filed to list its American depositary receipts this year. If the plan pans out, it would rank among the biggest New York debuts by a foreign company, giving American investors another way to play the AI memory trade.
“We’ve had an extraordinary move in semiconductor stocks since the late March lows, with memory stocks leading that surge,” said Richard Clode, a portfolio manager at Janus Henderson.
“For memory stocks, that is justified given very strong AI demand driving record margins and now long-term contracts to make this cycle more durable.” — Bloomberg
