For years, SK Hynix remained in Samsung’s shadow. Today, it is this memory manufacturer that symbolises South Korea’s success in the age of artificial intelligence. The company briefly overtook Samsung in terms of market capitalisation, becoming the most valuable listed company in South Korea.
The source of this success turned out to be a strategy that, just a decade ago, had raised many doubts. Following SK Group’s acquisition of Hynix Semiconductor in 2012, analysts were sceptical about the company’s prospects. At the time, Samsung dominated the DRAM market, and its value was many times higher.
Instead of competing directly with the market leader, SK Hynix focused on developing HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). This was a niche technology designed for the rapid transfer of large amounts of data, which had not found widespread application for many years. The company continued to develop successive generations of chips and invested in production capacity, even though demand remained limited.
The turning point came with the explosion of interest in artificial intelligence. The development of generative models, spurred on in part by the success of ChatGPT, increased demand for AI accelerators produced by Nvidia. It was HBM memory that became one of the key components of these systems. Thanks to years of investment, SK Hynix was ready for the surge in demand and quickly became the main supplier of such chips to Nvidia.
The results are evident in the financial figures. Following a difficult 2023, when the company recorded a significant operating loss due to a slowdown in the memory market, SK Hynix returned to record profits. In 2025, the company briefly overtook Samsung in terms of its share of the DRAM market, and its market capitalisation exceeded one trillion dollars.
The story of SK Hynix illustrates how a single technological decision can shift the balance of power in one of the world’s most capital-intensive industries. Whilst Samsung is striving to catch up in the HBM segment, SK Hynix has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global AI boom and proof that even long-standing market leaders are not guaranteed dominance.
