How Once-Struggling SK Hynix Became a Trillion-Dollar Company

SK Hynix Inc. is hardly a household name. But the maker of memory chips, which two decades ago was struggling to survive, is now South Korea’s second-most valuable listed company, just behind Samsung Electronics Co.

With the artificial intelligence boom fueling enormous demand for advanced memory chips, the company’s share price has risen roughly 13-fold since the start of 2025, with its market value hitting $1 trillion in May.

On July 10, SK Hynix American depositary receipts will start trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market in the US, exposing the company to an even deeper pool of capital.

What is SK Hynix?

SK Hynix’s roots trace back to 1983, when Hyundai Group, one of South Korea’s largest industrial conglomerates, founded Hyundai Electronics Industries as part of the country’s push into strategic industries, including semiconductors, amid a global boom in electronics. The company initially focused on manufacturing dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips — small semiconductors that temporarily store the data that computer processors need to access quickly.

Heavy investment in fabrication plants and advanced chipmaking technology turned Hyundai Electronics into one of the world’s leading DRAM suppliers by the 1990s.

This aggressive expansion left Hyundai Electronics in deep financial trouble when the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis struck. Slumping memory-chip prices and mounting debt forced a sweeping restructuring of Hyundai Group, and the company — renamed Hynix Semiconductor in 2001 as part of the overhaul — spent much of the following decade relying on creditor bailouts. It was nearly sold to US rival Micron Technology Inc. in 2002, but the deal collapsed.

A turning point came in 2012, when South Korea’s SK Group, a conglomerate with businesses spanning energy and telecommunications, acquired a controlling stake from Hynix’s creditors and renamed the company SK Hynix.

A year later, in 2013, the company, working with US chip designer Advanced Micro Devices Inc. introduced the world’s first high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, chip. By stacking multiple layers of DRAM vertically, the design delivered dramatically faster data transfer speeds while using less power.

Why is SK Hynix so valuable?

For decades, memory chips were a highly cyclical business, with prices rising and falling alongside demand for PCs and other electronics. Volatile profits and the soaring cost of building semiconductor factories forced many rivals out of the market, leaving the industry dominated by just three companies: Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix in South Korea, and Micron Technology in the US.

Today, memory chips are found in a variety of devices, including smartphones and gaming consoles, cars and household appliances. But it is AI that has transformed the industry’s economics. As AI systems become ever-larger and more sophisticated, data centers are consuming far greater volumes of advanced memory, creating a big bottleneck in memory chip supply.

Read more: Why the AI Boom Is Making Everything More Expensive

SK Hynix’s products are especially in demand as the HBM chips it pioneered have become a critical component in the processors used to train and run the biggest US AI platforms, such as Anthropic PBC’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. SK Hynix is the leading supplier of HBM chips to Nvidia Corp., the dominant designer of those processors, commonly known as AI accelerators.

How does SK Hynix compare to its rivals?

SK Hynix remains the dominant producer of HBM, accounting for an estimated 51% of the global market, according to market research firm TrendForce. That’s well ahead of Samsung Electronics, with about 26%, and Micron Technology, with roughly 23%.

But the race is intensifying as all three companies invest aggressively to expand production. Samsung and SK Hynix have announced plans to build two new chipmaking plants apiece in South Korea for a total of 800 trillion won ($530 billion). Micron is ramping up its investment in the US to $250 billion through to 2035.

They’re also competing to deliver the fastest and most advanced memory for AI. The next battleground is HBM4, the latest generation of high-bandwidth memory, which offers higher performance and greater capacity than its predecessors.

HBM4 will be used in Vera Rubin, Nvidia’s next-generation accelerator, which is expected to power the next wave of AI data centers. Although Samsung took an early lead by shipping its first commercial HBM4 chips to Nvidia in February, all three memory makers have since qualified their HBM4 chips for Vera Rubin and are now in production, with deliveries of the AI system set to ramp up in the second half of 2026.

How does SK Hynix’s US listing work?

SK Hynix’s meteoric rise has prompted it to seek a broader global investor base through the listing of its American depositary receipts on the Nasdaq.

An American depositary receipt, or ADR, is a US-traded certificate that represents shares of a non-US company. It allows investors to buy and sell a foreign company’s stock in US dollars on an American exchange without trading directly on its home market.

For SK Hynix, the listing is expected to make its shares more accessible to global investors while raising capital to fund its expansion. According to the company’s regulatory filing, the proceeds will be used to build new fabrication plants and buy advanced manufacturing equipment, including extreme ultraviolet lithography machines used to produce cutting-edge semiconductors.

Each ADR represents one-tenth of an ordinary share. SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion by selling 177.9 million ADRs at $149 each, equivalent to about 2.5% of its market value. The offering is the biggest-ever US listing by a foreign company.