How SK Hynix soared from $100 billion to $1 trillion in just 16 months

SK Hynix crossed $1 trillion in market value on Wednesday, capping one of the fastest rallies ever seen in the semiconductor industry.

Shares of the South Korean memory-chip maker jumped as much as 11.1% in Seoul, lifting its market capitalisation to a record 1,624 trillion won, or about $1.1 trillion.

Just 16 months ago, the company was worth less than $100 billion.

Its rapid rise has been driven by one product: high-bandwidth memory, the specialised chip that helps Nvidia’s AI processors handle vast amounts of data.

The memory chip behind the AI boom

High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, is not the “brain” of an AI system, as that role belongs to processors such as Nvidia’s graphics chips.

HBM is closer to the system that keeps those chips fed with data, without which even the most powerful AI processor cannot work at full speed.

That has made SK Hynix a key company in the AI supply chain.

The company is Nvidia’s main HBM supplier and controls about 57% of the global HBM market. It also holds about 32% of the wider DRAM memory market.

The financial impact has been sharp, as in the first quarter of 2026, SK Hynix reported revenue of 52.576 trillion won, or roughly $35 billion, and operating profit of 37.610 trillion won.

Its operating margin reached 72%, a record for the company. SK Hynix said the result was driven by strong AI infrastructure demand and higher sales of HBM, server DRAM and enterprise SSD products.

This is not a normal chip cycle where supply quickly catches up.

SK Hynix had already sold out its 2026 DRAM, NAND and HBM capacity.

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won has also warned that wafer shortages could last until 2030 because HBM production consumes a large amount of wafer capacity.

Bullish calls keep coming

Analysts have spent the past year trying to catch up with the pace of the memory rebound.

Goldman Sachs upgraded SK Hynix to Buy in late 2025, citing expectations for “one of the strongest memory upcycles” through 2026.

The bank said server memory demand would significantly outpace supply as hyperscalers continued to increase AI spending.

Bank of America has also framed 2026 as a memory “supercycle” similar to the boom of the 1990s, with global DRAM revenue forecast to rise 51% and NAND revenue 45%. It named SK Hynix its top pick in global memory.

Morgan Stanley has been another major bull case.

In January, the brokerage said SK Hynix was still trading as if little value was being assigned to HBM, even though AI data centres were making that business central to profits.

It raised its 2026 and 2027 earnings forecasts by 56% and 63%, respectively, and kept an overweight rating on the stock.

HSBC analyst Ricky Seo added to the positive view this month, forecasting a 40% quarter-on-quarter rise in SK Hynix’s DRAM average selling prices in the second quarter, above his earlier estimate of 28%.