Meet SK Hynix, the trillion-dollar South Korean chipmaker debuting on U.S. markets
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- SK Hynix begins trading on the Nasdaq on Friday under ticker SKHY at a market cap of about $1 trillion, following a more than sevenfold surge in its stock price over the past year driven by AI-related memory demand.
- SK Hynix dominates the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) segment used in Nvidia's AI chips and is projected to capture more than half the global HBM market in 2025, according to TrendForce analyst Ellie Wang.
- SK Hynix plans to raise around $29 billion through American depositary receipts, with proceeds funding a $4 billion advanced packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana, scheduled for completion in 2028 and supported by up to $458 million in CHIPS and Science Act funding.
- SK Hynix is committing up to $720 billion to expansion in South Korea, including a $390 billion Yongin fab cluster whose completion was pulled forward by more than a decade to 2033, and roughly $7.8 billion for ASML's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines by end of 2027.
- The memory industry is shifting away from quarterly and annual supply deals toward multi-year contracts, with Counterpoint's MS Hwang noting that hotels near Korean fabs are "fully booked" as cloud companies and chipmakers race to lock in capacity.
- Analysts are split on the sustainability of the rally: Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman warned that "it always crashes hard" in memory supercycles, even as LSEG-consensus estimates project SK Hynix's revenue tripling again from about $65 billion in 2025 to roughly $235 billion in 2026.
Why it matters: SK Hynix's Nasdaq debut gives U.S. investors direct access to the dominant supplier of the high-bandwidth memory most critical to Nvidia's AI infrastructure, but the $1 trillion valuation rests on assumptions that AI-driven demand will persist past 2027 — the earliest point industry experts say the memory shortage could ease.
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