The case is that AI has shifted the bottleneck from GPUs to memory and data-center infrastructure, and SK Hynix is the cleanest way to own that layer: HBM, DRAM, and enterprise NAND. NVDA proved the first leg, but the next leg is in memory supply, where SK Hynix, MU, and Samsung are locked into multi-year contracts and rising margins. The stock still screens cheaper than the obvious AI winners on forward earnings, even after the NASDAQ ADR’s ~40% premium, while buybacks, contract-backed revenue, and Nvidia co-development add support. The main risks are Samsung taking HBM share, capped upside from long-term pricing contracts, and an ADR premium that could compress if more shares become ADR-eligible.
$10,000 in ARM at its IPO three years ago would be about $40,000 today; $10,000 in PLTR at its 2020 direct listing would be almost $200,000.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched in November 2022 in San Francisco and hit 100 million users in 2 months, 4x faster than TikTok, 15x faster than Instagram, and 25x faster than YouTube.
Over the next four years, NVDA’s valuation rose from $400 billion to more than $5 trillion because its GPUs powered ChatGPT and generative AI.
Wall Street still has not fully priced the AI-infrastructure shift, even as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are on track to spend well over $1 trillion on AI infrastructure in 2025 and 2026 alone.
SK Hynix entered the NASDAQ this summer as SKHY on July 10, raising $26.5 billion in the largest U.S. IPO by a foreign company in stock market history; each ADR represents one-tenth of a Korean share.
SKHY trades around $175 per ADR versus about $126 implied by the Korea listing, a roughly 40% U.S. premium that values SK Hynix at about $1.3 trillion on NASDAQ versus $920 billion in Korea.
SK Hynix’s ADR supply is tightly capped because only 2.5% of shares can become ADRs; if that cap rises, the premium should shrink and the ADR price should fall toward the Korea price.
SK Hynix is not a pure-play HBM name: in the latest quarter, DRAM was 73% of revenue, NAND was 27%, and non-memory plus foundry was under 1%.
SK Hynix’s total quarterly revenue was 79 trillion won, about $55 billion, up 257% year over year; NAND revenue more than quadrupled, and DRAM/HBM revenue was about 25% bigger than MU’s business.
SK Hynix controls about half of global HBM dollars today, down from 64% a year ago after Samsung’s HBM share jumped from 21% to 33% in one quarter.
The last major memory downcycle produced about a $5.9 billion operating loss in 2023, but the latest quarter delivered about $42 billion in operating profit on $55 billion of revenue, a 76% operating margin, the highest in company history.
HBM is built to customer specs under pre-negotiated contracts; this year SK Hynix signed about 10 major 5-year-or-longer contracts with upfront deposits, making revenue more predictable while capping upside when memory prices spike.
Last quarter memory prices rose 30% to 60%, and SK Hynix missed operating-profit expectations because more revenue was locked at fixed prices than at Samsung or MU, sending the stock down close to 10% despite record earnings.
NVDA’s latest earnings showed purchase commitments rising from $119 billion to $279 billion in one quarter, mostly to lock in memory supply.
SK Hynix began shipping HBM4 in volume last quarter and sampled HBM4E in June; the new stack has 48 GB across 12 layers, up to 16 Gbits per second per pin, and roughly 4 TB/s of bandwidth per stack.
HBM4E is over 20% more power efficient and 17% better at heat resistance than the prior generation, while HBM takes about three times the wafers of standard memory and new fabs take 4 to 5 years to build.
On June 7, NVDA and SK Hynix announced a multi-year co-development partnership across Vera Rubin AI supercomputers, Vera CPUs, RTX Spark PCs, and Jetson robotics; 6 weeks later they signed an LOI tied to memory supplies and AI factories valued at over $500 billion.
At Computex 2026 in Taiwan, Jensen Huang wrote “Please make more on it” on an HBM4E wafer at the SK Hynix booth, underscoring that this is a co-design relationship, not a swappable supplier relationship.
SK Hynix is spending 40 trillion won, about $29 billion, on buybacks after calling the stock undervalued in a recent SEC filing, while the ADR still trades at about 5.8x forward earnings versus 6.8x for MU and 7.3x for SanDisk.
Samsung has caught up in HBM4 production and is taking meaningful share, so the key open question is how much of the AI-memory boom stays with SK Hynix versus leaks to Samsung and MU.