Seoul, June 22, 2026, 23:00 KST
- SK Hynix finished the session with a higher common-share market cap than Samsung Electronics, the first time that’s happened since 2000. The shift puts Korea’s top equity spot in the middle of the AI supply-chain trade.
- High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, has seen a sudden re-rating as demand for chips that serve Nvidia’s AI servers jumps. The stacked HBM chip pushes data quickly into AI processors and is now a key part of the Nvidia server supply chain.
- Another factor is fund plumbing. ETFs tracking Korea and MSCI indexes are starting to hit their own limits on how much they can hold in one company, with Samsung and SK Hynix taking up so much space in the market.
SK Hynix is now South Korea’s most valuable listed company after passing Samsung Electronics on Monday—a first in 26 years and a sign of shifting power in the memory-chip sector with the rise in AI demand. SK Hynix shares jumped 5.6%, pushing its market value to 2,080.4 trillion won ($1.35 trillion). Samsung slipped 0.14% to 2,066.7 trillion won, excluding preferred, at the close.
Handover is in focus now as investors stop seeing memory chips as just another cyclical trade. What’s at stake is control over HBM, the high-end memory inside AI accelerators from firms like Nvidia and Google. SK Hynix shares are up more than 340% this year, Reuters said.
Samsung lost its top spot for the first time since 2000, slipping behind SK Hynix by a slim margin. The move shows how the market is favoring AI-memory suppliers over conglomerates with broad electronics lines like phones, TVs, logic chips, and appliances. Seeking Alpha reported that investors had already pushed SK Hynix past Samsung intraday as AI-driven chip stocks rallied.
SK Hynix grabbed 61% of the global HBM market by 2025, ahead of Samsung at 17% and Micron at 21%, putting it in a stronger spot on pricing for this tougher-to-replace product, unlike regular DRAM. “The emergence of customised AI memory” changed the economics for the sector, Meritz Securities senior analyst Kim Sunwoo told Reuters. Reuters
Index math is at the core of this market mechanism. As of May 29, MSCI’s Korea index had Samsung Electronics at 33.73% and SK Hynix at 28.62%, sticking with those weights until after Monday’s close. BlackRock’s iShares MSCI South Korea ETF, the $26.3 billion fund trading in the U.S., follows the MSCI Korea 25/50 Index, which showed a 55.07% info tech slice as of June 18.
Not just trivia—MSCI’s 25/50 rules cap any one issuer at 25% of an index, and issuers above 5% together can’t go over 50%. In other words, the same country ETFs investors use for the Korea AI play can hit limits as Samsung and SK Hynix get bigger.
SK Hynix’s upcoming U.S. listing could go beyond just prestige. Reuters said this month the company is targeting a Nasdaq listing of American depositary receipts as soon as August. American depositary receipts are U.S.-traded certificates for foreign stocks. The listing could help SK Hynix reach a wider investor pool and put it in front of U.S. chip and AI funds.
SK Hynix’s rise comes after years of struggle. Hynix Semiconductor almost went under in 2002 because of heavy debt and was run by creditors for years. Later, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said he wanted Hynix to make “products are indispensable” instead of just selling generic memory chips. Reuters
Samsung pushed back, saying preferred shares should count toward market value. According to Reuters, that puts Samsung’s total at 2,246.4 trillion won as of the close. Bank of America numbers in the same report show Samsung is still leading on monthly DRAM wafer output this year, but SK Hynix could close the gap a lot by 2028.
AI-memory stocks are starting to dominate Korea’s market, and regulators are showing nerves. South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service chief Lee Chan-jin said Monday that approvals for leveraged ETFs linked to Samsung and SK Hynix were “prepared hastily.” He also said the agency is “seriously looking into” ways to stabilise the market after retail borrowing hit a record 60 trillion won by the end of May. Reuters
Investors now have to figure out if SK Hynix’s surge is about lasting changes in how the market values AI players, or if it’s just another crowded trade mixed in with Korea’s wider index moves. Right now, the market’s making a bet: it’s giving a higher price to the company seen as closest to the HBM squeeze. Samsung isn’t trading as the stand-in for Korea tech the way it used to.
