SK Hynix

SK Hynix is a South Korean semiconductor company and, alongside Samsung and Micron, one of only three firms that manufacture high-bandwidth memory (HBM) at scale. Founded in 1983 as part of Hyundai Electronics and acquired by the SK Group in 2012, it is one of the world's largest makers of DRAM and NAND flash memory.

The company's defining role in the AI era is HBM leadership. HBM is the gating constraint on AI accelerator performance — bandwidth between memory and compute matters more than raw FLOPS for most large-model workloads — and SK Hynix is the market leader, holding the largest share of HBM revenue and supplying roughly two-thirds of Nvidia's HBM4 allocation for the next-generation Vera Rubin platform. It began mass production of HBM4 in 2026 and formed a technology partnership with Nvidia to align future memory with Nvidia's accelerator roadmap.

In July 2026, SK Hynix raised about $26.5 billion in a Nasdaq listing — the largest-ever US debut by a non-American company, surpassing Alibaba's 2014 record — with proceeds funding new fabrication and advanced-packaging capacity. The listing was widely read as a bet that AI demand has broken the memory industry's historic boom-and-bust cycle.

In July 2026 SK Group and NVIDIA signed letters of intent on a partnership valued at more than $500 billion that extends the memory relationship into infrastructure. Alongside a long-term supply agreement covering HBM and its successors, sister company SK Telecom will build a 2-gigawatt AI factory in Korea on NVIDIA's DSX platform, running Vera Rubin accelerators on SK Hynix HBM4, with the first phase due online in 2027. The two companies also committed to co-engineering memory stacks tuned to the bandwidth, power and thermal profile of large-model training and real-time inference.