SK Hynix overtakes Samsung to become South Korea’s most valuable company

SK Hynix briefly passed Samsung Electronics on June 22 to become South Korea’s most valuable listed company, after a 5.6% share-price jump lifted its market value to about 2,080.4 trillion won, or $1.35 trillion. Samsung’s market value was about 2,066.7 trillion won at the same point, ending a run at the top of South Korea’s market-cap rankings that had lasted since around 2000.

The shift was the payoff from a 14-year gamble on high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, a niche component that can feed data fast enough for modern data centers and AI workloads. While Samsung stayed closer to scale and convention in memory chips, SK Hynix moved early into a product that became essential as Nvidia and other AI chip buyers drove demand for the newest generation of processors.

SK Hynix and AMD jointly developed the world’s first TSV, or Through Silicon Via, HBM product in 2014. The company then stumbled on later generations and at one point debated whether to halt development altogether. Instead, it doubled down, invested in new production capacity and kept refining the technology until HBM became one of the most strategic bottlenecks in the AI supply chain.

That strategy has translated into market power. SK Hynix held 61% of the global HBM market in 2025, compared with Micron’s 21% and Samsung’s 17%. Its shares were up more than 340% in 2026 at the time of the move, underscoring how concentrated the AI-memory boom had become around a single company and a single technical standard.

The company’s rise also reflects a longer corporate arc. SK Hynix was founded in 1983 as a Hyundai unit and was acquired by SK Group in 2012, a deal once viewed by some as financially irresponsible. The turn from underdog to market leader has now drawn in policymakers as well: South Korea’s government is discussing the next phase of large-scale semiconductor investments with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, treating the chip race as a national strategic issue rather than a simple corporate rivalry.