SK Hynix Just Took Samsung’s Crown for the First Time in 26 Years

SK Hynix shares surged 6.5% to a record 2.95 million won, briefly overtaking Samsung Electronics as South Korea's most valuable publicly traded company for the first time in 26 years. The historic shift hinges on SK Hynix's commanding 57% share of the global high-bandwidth memory (HBM) market, the specialized chips powering AI data centers and graphics processing units.

Samsung Electronics, long the dominant Korean tech conglomerate, fell to second place as investors rotated into pure-play AI exposure. HBM chips have become critical infrastructure for training and running large language models, creating a supply bottleneck that favors producers with proven manufacturing capability at scale.

The market cap reversal marks a broader regime change: diversified hardware manufacturers are losing ground to companies with concentrated positions in AI supply chains. SK Hynix has locked in multi-year HBM supply agreements with Nvidia and other AI chip designers, providing revenue visibility that Samsung's sprawling consumer electronics and smartphone businesses cannot match.