A Wafer Autograph and a Regulatory Fast Lane: Inside SK Hynix's Race to Feed Nvidia's AI Appetite
03.06.2026 - 13:02:56 | boerse-global.de
The message was scrawled in marker across an HBM4E wafer at the Computex trade show in Taipei: “Please Make More.” Nvidia chief Jensen Huang signed the silicon himself, a personal plea that underscored just how acute the memory crunch has become. The wafer went on display at SK Hynix’s booth on June 2, just as the South Korean chipmaker hit a fresh milestone — a market capitalisation of roughly $1.06 trillion.
The trillion-dollar valuation, reached on the same day as Huang’s visit, is powered by numbers that leave little room for debate. SK Hynix booked an operating profit of 37.61 trillion won ($25 billion) in the first quarter of 2026, a 405 percent leap from a year earlier. Revenue nearly tripled to 52.58 trillion won, pushing the operating margin to 72 percent. The engine behind those figures is High Bandwidth Memory, the high-speed DRAM that feeds Nvidia’s AI accelerators; SK Hynix commands a 58 percent share of the HBM market.
Yet the most consequential development for the company’s near-term outlook may have come not from Taipei but from Seoul. South Korea’s trade ministry slashed the approval process for extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment — the critical tooling needed for advanced chip production — from 34 days to just nine. By reclassifying EUV gear from “pressurised gas equipment” to “special equipment,” the government has removed a bureaucratic bottleneck that had been slowing production ramp-ups.
The timing is deliberate. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won warned on the Computex floor that a structural memory deficit will persist until at least 2030, driven by insatiable AI demand. The regulatory fast track allows SK Hynix to bring new fabrication lines for advanced packaging and memory production online far more quickly, giving the group a crucial edge in the global race for AI chip capacity.
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Chey announced plans to double the company’s total wafer production capacity within five years, pivoting from a traditional chipmaker model toward what he calls an “AI factory” concept. That expansion will require billions in capital, and SK Hynix is preparing to tap U.S. investors for a large chunk of it. Between June and July of this year, it plans to list American Depositary Receipts in New York, with market observers estimating a deal size of $10 billion to $14 billion. The proceeds are earmarked for AI memory capacity, including the Yongin semiconductor cluster.
The funding push comes as the company extends its technological lead. On the Computex sidelines, Chey and Huang discussed the eighth generation of HBM5 memory and its integration into Nvidia’s upcoming “Vera Rubin” AI architecture. Mass production of the SOCAMM2 modules — which deliver more than double the bandwidth and 75 percent better energy efficiency than standard RDIMM2 products — is already under way. Those specifications are precisely what is needed to break the memory bottlenecks that throttle large language model training.
SK Hynix’s dominance is not confined to DRAM. The global NAND flash market generated $46 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2026, a 3.5-fold increase year on year, and the company holds a particularly strong position in high-capacity enterprise SSDs — a segment expected to account for over 60 percent of total NAND business by year-end.
SK Hynix at a turning point? This analysis reveals what investors need to know now.
At the KOSPI close, SK Hynix shares were trading at 2,363,000 won, a gain of roughly 248 percent since the start of the year. But the rally has prompted a wave of profit-taking. Over the past 18 trading days, foreign investors have net sold about 60 trillion won ($43 billion) in Korean equities, with 83 percent of that selling concentrated in SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics. Analysts view the move as tactical rather than structural, pointing to the sector’s continued momentum. In Frankfurt, SK Hynix depositary receipts inched up 0.72 percent to €1,385 on Wednesday.
The next battle is already taking shape. SK Hynix and arch-rival Samsung are locked in a development race for HBM5, with the winner likely to set the standard for market leadership through 2028. Meanwhile, Huang’s autograph on that wafer has become a symbol of an industry where the chipmaker that can make more, faster, will own the AI memory throne.
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