SK海力士：超越三星成韩国市值第一，AI内存巨头崛起

On 22 June 2026, something happened on the Korea Stock Exchange that hadn't occurred in 25 years and seven months: a new company sat at the top.SK Hynix surpassed Samsung Electronics by market capitalisation, closing at ₩2,919,000 per share to edge ahead with a market cap of approximately ₩2,080 trillion (around $1.35 trillion). Samsung, which had held the crown without interruption since November 2000, fell to second place.Here is the detail that makes this remarkable: in 2001, SK Hynix was trading at 125 Korean won. A penny stock. One of South Korea's most derided corporations, kept alive only by creditor bailouts. Today it has a larger market cap than Nike, Netflix, and Salesforce combined.This guide covers what SK Hynix is, how it turned a near-bankruptcy into the greatest corporate comeback in Korean history, why its AI memory dominance is only getting stronger, and the most direct ways for investors to get exposure, including trading EWYUSDT perpetuals on BitMEX.In this article:What is SK Hynix?Why is it called SK Hynix?What does SK Hynix make?SK Hynix stock: ticker, price, and performanceSK Hynix valuation: PE ratio and analyst targetsHow to buy SK Hynix stockHow to trade EWYUSDT on BitMEXWhat is SK Hynix?SK Hynix is a South Korean semiconductor company and the world's second-largest memory chip manufacturer. It produces the memory that goes inside servers, laptops, smartphones, and the AI GPUs that are reshaping the global economy.It is headquartered in Icheon, South Korea, employs approximately 30,000 people, and operates fabrication facilities in South Korea, China, and the United States. It trades on the Korea Exchange (KRX) under the ticker 000660.By sector, SK Hynix sits in semiconductors / information technology. It is a pure-play memory company. Unlike Samsung, it does not make phones, televisions, or home appliances. Its entire business is chips.As of June 2026, it is South Korea's most valuable publicly listed company, with a market capitalisation of approximately $1.35 trillion.Why is it Called SK Hynix?The name is a two-part story. “SK” refers to the SK Group — one of South Korea’s largest conglomerates, with businesses spanning telecoms, energy, and semiconductors — which acquired the company in 2012.“Hynix” is the older part of the name. The company was founded in 1983 as Hyundai Electronics, part of the Hyundai industrial group. Following the Asian Financial Crisis in the late 1990s, the Korean government pushed major conglomerates to consolidate. Hyundai Electronics merged with LG Semicon to form one of the world’s largest memory manufacturers. When the Hyundai Group fragmented under debt pressure, the chip division was cut loose and rebranded Hynix Semiconductor in 2001, a portmanteau of Hyundai and “nix.”The company spent the next decade fighting for survival. Its stock fell to ₩125. It became a byword for corporate failure. Then SK Telecom bought in, renamed it SK Hynix, and changed the trajectory entirely.The stock that was worth ₩125 in 2001 closed at ₩2,919,000 on 22 June 2026. That is a 23,000x recovery in 25 years. One of the most extraordinary corporate comebacks in modern economic history.What Does SK Hynix Make?SK Hynix’s business runs across three product lines.DRAM is the largest by revenueDynamic random-access memory is the working memory inside every server, laptop, and phone. SK Hynix produces server DRAM for data centres, mobile DRAM for handsets, and consumer DRAM for PCs. Server DRAM pricing rose 83–95% quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2026, driven by AI infrastructure buildout. SK Hynix is the world’s second-largest DRAM producer behind Samsung.NAND flash is the technology behind solid-state drivesSK Hynix makes both enterprise SSDs (for data centres) and consumer SSDs, including the well-regarded Platinum P41 and Gold P31 product lines. It recently launched a 321-layer QLC-based cSSD. NAND is more commoditised than DRAM and carries thinner margins, but it is a meaningful part of the revenue base.High-bandwidth memory (HBM) is where the entire investment thesis livesHBM is the specialised memory that sits inside AI GPUs. It commands pricing that makes conventional DRAM look cheap. It is the product that drove SK Hynix’s operating margin to 72% in Q1 2026, surpassing even TSMC. Everything else in this article flows from this one product line.The ASML → TSMC → SK Hynix → NVIDIA Supply ChainOne of the most-searched questions about SK Hynix is how it connects to ASML, TSMC, and NVIDIA. The answer is the supply chain that produces every advanced AI chip in the world.ASML is the Dutch company that makes extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines used to etch circuit patterns at nanometre scale. Without ASML’s machines, no one can manufacture leading-edge chips. ASML is the toolmaker for the entire advanced semiconductor industry.TSMC uses ASML’s machines to fabricate logic chips — processors, GPUs, AI accelerators — at its fabs in Taiwan. NVIDIA designs its H100, H200, and Blackwell GPUs but does not manufacture them. TSMC does.SK Hynix uses similar lithography equipment to manufacture the memory dies that become HBM. Those dies are stacked vertically, connected through the package, and integrated with the logic chip to form a complete GPU assembly.NVIDIA combines that package into its AI accelerators, which go into servers running the world’s large language models, image generators, and AI inference workloads.The chain: ASML equipment → TSMC logic fab + SK Hynix memory fab → NVIDIA GPU package → AI data centre. Remove any link and the whole thing stops. That is why SK Hynix’s 62% share of the HBM market gives it such extraordinary pricing power.HBM: The Memory the World Cannot Get Enough ofStandard DRAM communicates with a processor via a relatively narrow interface. For consumer applications — web browsing, office software, streaming — it is more than adequate. For training a large AI model, it is a bottleneck.High-bandwidth memory solves this by stacking multiple DRAM dies vertically, connected by thousands of microscopic pathways called through-silicon vias (TSVs). The resulting stack sits directly on the GPU package, connected by an interface orders of magnitude wider than standard memory. SK Hynix’s HBM3E achieves 9.6 Gbps per pin and 1.15 terabytes per second of bandwidth per stack, approximately ten times what DDR5 delivers.Every NVIDIA GPU used in AI infrastructure — H100, H200, B100, B200, and now Vera Rubin — requires HBM. There is no substitute. Only three companies in the world can manufacture it: SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron.SK Hynix was the first to mass-produce HBM4 (September 2024) and is currently the only supplier simultaneously shipping stable volumes of both HBM3E and HBM4. It holds approximately 62% of the global HBM market. On 2 June 2026, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang publicly urged SK Hynix to produce more — a declaration of just how constrained supply is.On 5 June 2026, NVIDIA confirmed all three memory makers passed HBM4 certification for the Vera Rubin accelerator. Certification is not supply volume. SK Hynix remains the primary supplier by a wide margin.SK Hynix Stock: Ticker, Price, and PerformanceSK Hynix trades on the Korea Exchange (KRX) under ticker 000660. There is no US-listed ticker yet. That changes with the upcoming ADR.For investors outside Korea who want USD pricing, SK Hynix is quoted on OTC markets and on European exchanges including Frankfurt. Liquidity on these venues is thin.The stock’s performance in 2026 has been exceptional. It is up more than 340% year-to-date. It hit a $1 trillion market cap in May 2026 — one of a handful of non-US companies to reach that level. It closed at ₩2,919,000 on 22 June 2026, up 5.61% on the day it overtook Samsung.Analyst consensus target sits near ₩2.78 million, with Hanwha Investment & Securities setting the highest-ever domestic Korean price target at ₩4.3 million, implying roughly 47% upside from the June 22 close.Q1 2026 Earnings: 72% Ope