SK hynix briefly tops Samsung as Korea’s most valuable company—and it’s reportedly eyeing a U.S. listing as soon as August

For one day, at least, South Korea had a new most valuable company. SK hynix, one of the world’s largest producers of memory chips, surpassed Samsung Electronics in market capitalization on Monday. After a 5.6% surge in its share price, SK hynix was worth over 2.1 quadrillion won ($1.35 trillion), just ahead of Samsung at $1.34 trillion. Samsung retook the top spot on Tuesday, after SK hynix’s shares slumped nearly 12.5% as part of a broad tech sell-off. Samsung’s shares dropped 12.3%, while the KOSPI index also dropped 10%. Still, SK hynix’s rise to the top is a rapid change for a company that, at one point, was lost in the wilderness as a struggling electronics maker, spun off from Hyundai in 2003 and acquired by SK in 2011. SK hynix is now the world’s leading producer of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), key to the manufacture of AI processors and graphics processing units made by companies like Nvidia. The company controls about 58% of the HBM market as measured by revenue, according to Counterpoint Research. Samsung and Micron Technologies sit in second and third place, respectively. Samsung, in particular, was slow to enter the AI processor market, letting SK hynix become the exclusive supplier for Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell platforms. The AI boom has lifted SK hynix’s fortunes by a staggering amount. The company generated a record 97 trillion won ($63.1 billion) in revenue in 2025, a 47% jump from the year before and reaching a record for the company. The jump in profits was even more impressive: SK hynix earned 42.9 trillion won ($27.9 billion) in net profit, double the year before. More broadly, memory chipmakers like SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron are benefiting from a worldwide shortage of memory chips from the rapid build-out of AI infrastructure. SK hynix’s shares are up by almost 900% over the past 12 months, compared to almost 180% for the broader KOSPI index. Korean investors have piled into the country’s stock market to try to capture these massi