Nvidia’s biggest RAM supplier just had a trillion-dollar debut on Wall Street
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- SK Hynix opened at $170 per share on Wall Street Friday, raising $26.5 billion — surpassing Alibaba's record as the largest debut of a foreign company, according to the Associated Press and CNN.
- SK Hynix reached a $1 trillion valuation in May and briefly overtook Samsung as South Korea's most valuable company, riding the AI-driven memory chip boom.
- OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google use DRAM for the servers powering their AI models, while HBM — supplied by SK Hynix — comes packaged inside NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra chips.
- Samsung holds 38% of the global DRAM market as of June 2026, ahead of SK Hynix at 29% and Micron at 22%, according to Counterpoint data.
- The three chipmakers still can't meet demand, prioritizing high-paying AI customers over device makers who need memory for phones, computers, and consoles.
- SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won said in June the company plans to ramp up memory chip capacity over the next five years to address a shortage projected to last until 2030, Bloomberg reports.
Why it matters: SK Hynix's $26.5 billion raise — the largest foreign-company debut ever — pours new capital into a memory-chip supply chain that already can't keep up with AI demand. With the global shortage projected to last until 2030, device makers competing for DRAM with hyperscalers like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google face sustained allocation pressure that could keep consumer electronics memory costs elevated.
