SK Hynix's shares rose 9.41% on 27 May 2026, pushing the chipmaker's market capitalisation to 1,600 trillion won — approximately US$1.07 trillion — just three weeks after Samsung Electronics crossed the same threshold on 6 May. The crossing makes SK Hynix the third Asian company to reach a trillion-dollar value, after Taiwan's TSMC and its domestic rival Samsung — and it gives South Korea two trillion-dollar companies at the same time, a distinction built on a structural shift in the economics of AI memory rather than a cyclical price spike, according to the Seoul Economic Daily.
A Three-Week Double
Samsung's 6 May crossing was already a landmark: shares surged 14.41% that day, pushing the KOSPI to a closing record of 7,384.56 — the index's first close above 7,000 — and lifting total market capitalisation to 6,058 trillion won, according to a separate Seoul Economic Daily report. SK Hynix compressed the gap to under a month. Shares traded as high as 14.9% above their previous close before settling at a 9.41% gain, taking the stock to 2,245,000 won and the market cap to 1,600.0168 trillion won — an increase of roughly 140 trillion won in a single session. Year-to-date, the stock has gained approximately 240%, a run that began with the AI infrastructure build-out and accelerated sharply through Q1 earnings season.
What the Earnings Say
The valuation move is anchored in real cash generation. SK Hynix's Q1 2026 results, reported in late April, showed revenue of 52.58 trillion won and operating profit of 37.61 trillion won — a more-than-fivefold increase over Q1 2025 — on an operating margin of 72%, per the company's official release. That margin exceeded TSMC's Q1 2026 operating margin of 58.1% and NVIDIA's operating margin of approximately 66% in its fiscal quarter ending April 2026. Memory chip prices roughly doubled in Q1 2026, with further gains expected through mid-year as supply constraints persist into 2028.
HBM4 and the NVIDIA Lock-In
The commercial engine behind the numbers is high-bandwidth memory. SK Hynix holds more than 70% of NVIDIA's HBM4 supply allocation for the Vera Rubin AI accelerator platform — a position reported as far back as January 2026 and consistent across multiple industry sources since. Samsung holds the remaining allocation; Micron is excluded from top-tier Vera Rubin configurations. On SK Hynix's Q1 earnings call, management said customer requests for HBM already exceed planned production capacity through the next three years. The company is addressing that gap with a 19 trillion won advanced-packaging fab in Cheongju — named P&T7, adjacent to the M15X front-end facility — and a US$3.87 billion facility in West Lafayette, Indiana, where groundbreaking began in April 2026 with mass production targeted for the second half of 2028.
HBM4 is not an incremental improvement. Each GPU in a Vera Rubin rack requires stacked memory bandwidth that conventional DRAM or earlier HBM generations cannot deliver. This positions SK Hynix less as a commodity supplier and more as a gating input for AI infrastructure — similar to how EUV lithography machines gate advanced logic chip production.
A Korean Flag in the Club
South Korea is now the first country outside the United States to have two companies in the trillion-dollar club simultaneously, with Samsung and SK Hynix both holding that status. Other non-US members — TSMC of Taiwan and Saudi Aramco — are sole representatives of their respective countries. For South Korea, the milestone reflects a deliberate, decades-long industrial bet on semiconductor manufacturing that is paying off precisely as AI compute demand makes HBM memory as strategically critical as advanced logic chips.
ASEAN Supply-Chain Read-Through
The concentration of HBM supply in South Korea has direct implications for ASEAN data-centre development. Hyperscalers building capacity in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia source their AI accelerators through NVIDIA and the broader US chip supply chain — which now runs through Icheon and Cheongju as much as it does through TSMC's fabs in Hsinchu. Any disruption to Korean memory output, whether from geopolitics, natural disaster, or export controls, would propagate directly into ASEAN data-centre timelines. Sustained Korean HBM dominance reduces supply-chain risk only if the geopolitical environment remains stable — a condition that is not guaranteed.
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