SK Hynix posts record quarterly profit, shares fall on AI expectations

SK Hynix posted record quarterly revenue of 22.23 trillion won, or $16.1 billion, but the Seoul-listed stock still fell as much as 9.9% after the results. The company said operating profit reached 9.21 trillion won, also a record, even as the numbers missed the most optimistic investor forecasts. The market reaction showed how quickly strong earnings can be eclipsed when AI demand has already pushed expectations higher.

The South Korean chipmaker has become the world’s top supplier of high-bandwidth memory chips used in AI accelerators, putting it at the center of the hardware build-out behind Nvidia’s data-center spending. Demand for those chips has surged as cloud providers and AI developers race to add memory capacity for larger workloads, and SK Hynix said it expects HBM demand to stay strong through the rest of the year. The company has also said it plans to expand investment as it ramps next-generation memory production.

Even with those tailwinds, investors focused on whether the pace of growth can be sustained. SK Hynix’s revenue rose 35% from a year earlier, while operating profit jumped 68%, numbers that would normally be enough to lift a semiconductor stock. Instead, the shares closed down 8.95%, a sign that the market is increasingly judging chipmakers on whether they can keep margins elevated, not just post another strong quarter.

That scrutiny matters because memory has become one of the most important bottlenecks in the AI supply chain. If competitors expand output too quickly, pricing can soften and margins can come under pressure just as demand begins to normalize. For now, chip valuations are being driven less by what companies have already delivered than by whether the AI build-out can keep accelerating without showing signs of overheating.

SK Hynix has seen this pattern before. On Jan. 22, 2025, the company had already posted a record quarterly profit, but its shares still dipped on concern about future demand. The latest sell-off suggests investors have grown even less forgiving: in an AI boom, a record quarter is no longer enough unless it also proves the cycle still has room to run.