SK Hynix surpasses Samsung to become South Korea’s most valuable company

Twenty years ago, SK Hynix was drowning in debt and teetering on the edge of collapse. On June 22, 2026, it briefly overtook Samsung Electronics to become South Korea’s most valuable publicly traded company.

SK Hynix’s market capitalization hit approximately $1.35 trillion, or roughly 2,082.5 trillion won, nudging past Samsung’s 2,081.3 trillion won in intraday trading. The chipmaker’s shares surged over 5.7% on the day, dragging the broader KOSPI index upward with it.

The AI memory chip gold rush

The engine behind this reversal of fortune has a name: high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. These are the specialized chips that power the GPUs running AI workloads in data centers worldwide.

SK Hynix commands roughly 57% of HBM revenue in recent quarters, making it the dominant supplier for Nvidia’s AI accelerators. Samsung and Micron, its two main competitors, have been playing catch-up.

On May 27, SK Hynix joined the exclusive $1 trillion market-cap club, becoming only the third Asian company to reach that threshold. Less than a month later, it added another $350 billion in value. Its stock has reportedly surged over 1,000% in the past year.

SK Hynix and Samsung combined now represent such an outsized portion of South Korea’s stock market that their collective market capitalization has at times exceeded the country’s entire GDP.

What this means for crypto infrastructure

The data centers powering AI training are, in many cases, the same facilities that host crypto mining operations and blockchain validation nodes. The GPUs that Nvidia sells, loaded with SK Hynix’s HBM chips, are the workhorses for both sectors.

The rise of HBM4, SK Hynix’s next-generation memory standard, could further reshape this landscape. The company expects to maintain greater than 50% market share in HBM4, which promises faster speeds and better energy efficiency.

The Samsung dethroning in perspective

Samsung has been South Korea’s corporate crown jewel for decades. It’s not just a chipmaker. It builds phones, appliances, displays, and entire semiconductor fabrication plants. SK Hynix, by contrast, does essentially one thing: memory chips.

Micron, the American competitor, also joined the $1 trillion club alongside them, creating a three-way race in AI memory.

On the day SK Hynix overtook Samsung, its market cap also briefly surpassed Bitcoin’s total value in intraday trading.

The competitive dynamics between SK Hynix and Samsung will also determine pricing for the memory components that go into mining rigs and validator hardware. If SK Hynix maintains its 57% grip on HBM revenue and prioritizes AI customers, crypto hardware manufacturers may need to look to Samsung or Micron for supply, potentially at different price points and performance tiers.

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