SK Hynix stock surged nearly 7% on Tuesday, powering South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI index above the 8,000 mark for the first time as investors doubled down on the artificial intelligence trade.
The rally had two engines: Nvidia’s latest blowout quarter, which reset expectations for AI hardware demand, and renewed hopes that a draft US-Iran framework could ease pressure on oil prices.
At the centre of it all was SK Hynix, the memory maker whose high-bandwidth chips have become critical to the AI accelerator supply chain.
Nvidia pulls the trigger
The spark came from California as Nvidia last week reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of $81.6 billion, up 85% from a year earlier, while data centre revenue surged 92% to $75.2 billion.
Chief Executive Jensen Huang told investors that demand had “gone parabolic,” giving memory investors exactly the signal they were waiting for.
For SK Hynix, Nvidia is more than another customer as it is the reference buyer for the AI supply chain, and SK Hynix remains one of the key suppliers of high-bandwidth memory used in AI chipsets.
The company sees client requests for HBM over the next three years already exceeding its production capacity.
That has fed a sharp round of analyst upgrades.
UBS recently lifted its SK Hynix target price to 1.7 million won and raised 2026 and 2027 earnings-per-share forecasts by 22% and 29%, citing a memory cycle unusually powerful by historical standards.
Sold out, and pricing like it
The bull case is no longer built only on AI excitement. It is showing up in pricing, margins and capacity plans.
SK Hynix reported first-quarter revenue of 52.58 trillion won and operating profit of 37.61 trillion won, with an operating margin of 72%.
Operating profit was up 405% from a year earlier, helped by strong sales of HBM, high-capacity server DRAM modules and enterprise SSDs.
TrendForce expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise 58% to 63% quarter-on-quarter in the second quarter, while NAND flash contract prices are projected to jump 70% to 75%.
That gives investors a hard data point behind the market’s enthusiasm: AI demand is not just lifting narratives, it is tightening supply across the memory stack.
Mirae Asset Securities raised its target price for SK Hynix to 3.2 million won, while SK Securities has floated a 3 million won bull case, though that depends partly on Samsung failing to narrow the HBM gap quickly.
Korea’s market gets rewritten
The rally has turned the KOSPI into one of the world’s most direct public-market bets on AI infrastructure.
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together accounted for 44% of the KOSPI’s total value when the index first broke 7,000 earlier this month, and the benchmark was already up 75% for 2026 after a 76% gain in 2025.
Trading has become just as concentrated.
As per Korean media, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix recently accounted for a large share of daily transaction value, reinforcing how much of the market’s momentum now runs through two semiconductor names.
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