SK Hynix Tops $1 Trillion on Surge in HBM Demand

SK Hynix reached a market value of about 1,624 trillion won, or roughly $1.1 trillion, after shares rose as much as 11.1% in Seoul on Wednesday. The company was valued at under $100 billion 16 months ago.

High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, supplies large volumes of data to AI processors so they can operate at full speed. SK Hynix is Nvidia’s main supplier of HBM and holds about 57% of the global HBM market and roughly 32% of the wider DRAM market.

In the first quarter of 2026, SK Hynix reported revenue of 52.576 trillion won and an operating profit of 37.610 trillion won, an operating margin of 72%, a company record. The firm attributed the results to strong AI infrastructure demand and higher sales of HBM, server DRAM and enterprise SSD products.

SK Hynix said it has sold out its DRAM, NAND and HBM capacity for 2026. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won warned wafer shortages could persist through 2030 because HBM production consumes a large share of wafer capacity. Industry inventories are reported to be thin and memory prices have risen amid those supply constraints.

Investment banks and brokerages revised forecasts upward over the past year. Goldman Sachs upgraded SK Hynix to Buy in late 2025 and projected a strong memory upcycle through 2026 as hyperscalers increase AI spending. Bank of America described 2026 as a memory “supercycle,” forecasting global DRAM revenue to rise 51% and NAND revenue 45%, and named SK Hynix its top pick in global memory. Morgan Stanley raised its 2026 and 2027 earnings forecasts for SK Hynix by 56% and 63%, respectively. An HSBC analyst projected a 40% quarter-on-quarter rise in DRAM average selling prices in the second quarter.

Samsung Electronics crossed the $1 trillion market-value threshold on May 6 and Micron Technology reached $1 trillion on Tuesday. With SK Hynix’s gain, the three major memory-chip makers each surpassed $1 trillion in market value in the same month.