SK Hynix’s 179% Year-to-Date Rally Masks a Turbulent Week as $500 Billion Nvidia Pact Meets an 8% Single-Day Rout
Published on 07/27/2026 at 12:12 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
SK Hynix investors are navigating one of the most volatile stretches in the memory chipmaker’s recent history, with a landmark partnership announcement colliding head-on with a sharp pre-earnings selloff. The stock closed Friday at 1,759,000 won, down 8.34% in a single session and 41.11% below its 52-week peak of 2,987,000 won reached on June 25. Yet just two trading days later, the shares rebounded 3.24% to 1,816,000 won, extending a seven-day recovery that has added nearly 3%.
The whipsaw action reflects a market struggling to reconcile two powerful narratives: a multi-hundred-billion-dollar strategic alliance with Nvidia, and the immediate uncertainty surrounding second-quarter earnings due Wednesday.
A $500 Billion Framework With Room to Grow
Over the weekend, SK Group and Nvidia signed a memorandum of understanding for a comprehensive partnership valued at more than $500 billion, focused on building out artificial intelligence infrastructure. The agreement covers everything from constructing complete AI factories to supplying next-generation memory chips. SK Telecom separately plans to build a 2-gigawatt AI cloud in South Korea using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, with the first facility slated to begin operations in 2027.
The scope may be even larger. According to Korea Economic Daily, a separate five-year letter of intent involving SK Hynix, Nvidia, and Microsoft carries a price tag of $750 billion. Combined with a previously announced $200 billion memory and foundry deal between Samsung and Broadcom, the total value of South Korean-American semiconductor commitments now approaches $950 billion, according to multiple reports. The announcements coincided with President Lee Jae-myung’s visit to San Francisco, where he promoted an $880 billion AI investment program.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SK Hynix?
For SK Hynix, the Nvidia pact provides something its investors have long sought: long-term offtake certainty. The two companies will jointly develop the next generation of AI memory, including HBM chips designed for large language models and autonomous AI systems. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised South Korea’s chip expertise and industrial infrastructure as an ideal foundation for the partnership, while SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won framed the strategy in stark terms: in the AI era, success depends not just on how effectively you deploy intelligence, but on how much you can produce yourself.
The HBM Dominance That Underpins the Deal
The partnership formalizes a relationship that already defines the high-bandwidth memory market. Every H100, H200, and Blackwell GPU that Nvidia ships to data centers contains HBM memory from SK Hynix. UBS estimates that by 2026, the company will control roughly 70% of the HBM4 market for Nvidia’s upcoming Rubin platform.
Current market share data from BNP Paribas puts SK Hynix at 57% of the global HBM market, well ahead of Samsung at 22% and Micron at 21%. The overall HBM market is projected to double from $76 billion this year to $156 billion by 2027. That trajectory explains why analysts view the Nvidia partnership as strategic validation rather than a symbolic gesture — and why the stock’s recent decline has drawn bargain hunters.
Why the Market Sold Into the News
Despite the deal’s magnitude, Friday’s selloff erased any post-announcement enthusiasm. The 8.34% drop suggests investors are prioritizing near-term earnings risk over long-term contract visibility. The consensus forecast calls for second-quarter revenue of 84.06 trillion won, with operating profit estimates ranging from 64.09 trillion to 64.24 trillion won. Analysts project an operating margin of 75% to 77%, exceeding TSMC’s recently reported 60.3% — a testament to SK Hynix’s pricing power in the HBM segment.
Yet high expectations create their own risk. Samsung delivered first samples of its new HBM4E memory last week, temporarily shifting attention to the competitive landscape. While SK Hynix retains its leadership position, the move signals that the race for the next memory generation is accelerating.
Institutional Buying Provides a Floor
South Korea’s National Pension Service bought a net 425.8 billion won worth of SK Hynix shares in July, according to Korea Economic Daily. Analyst Cha Young-joo recommended using price weakness as a buying opportunity, a view supported by the Kospi’s historically low price-to-earnings ratio of 5.7.
SK Hynix at a turning point? This analysis reveals what investors need to know now.
Technical indicators paint a mixed picture. The 14-day relative strength index stands at 40.1, suggesting weak but not oversold conditions. The annualized 30-day volatility exceeds 118%, underscoring the extreme nervousness surrounding the HBM4 supply commitments and the upcoming earnings report. The RSI of 42.1 recorded on Monday’s bounce-back session confirms the stock remains in a neutral zone — neither overbought nor oversold.
The Earnings Test
Wednesday’s report will provide the first concrete look at how surging AI memory demand is translating into revenue and profit. Investors will be watching for details on pricing trends, capacity utilization, and HBM4 shipment timelines. The stock’s 179.52% year-to-date gain — achieved despite a 39.2% decline from its June high — suggests the long-term thesis remains intact, but the near-term path depends on whether the numbers can justify the optimism baked into the Nvidia alliance.
For now, SK Hynix sits at the intersection of two forces: a structural boom in AI infrastructure spending that could sustain growth for years, and a cyclical correction in a stock that ran too far, too fast. Wednesday’s numbers will determine which force wins the next leg.
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