For 27 years, South Korea’s corporate hierarchy was set in stone: Samsung Electronics ruled at the top, and everyone else fought for second place. On June 22, that order finally cracked.

Riding the global frenzy for artificial intelligence hardware, memory maker SK Hynix edged past Samsung to become South Korea’s most valuable listed company. Korea Exchange data shows SK Hynix’s market cap at ₩2,091 trillion (about $1.35 trillion), just above Samsung’s ₩2,090 trillion. It’s the first time since 1999 that the latter has been knocked off the top of the KOSPI index.

Two decades ago, SK Hynix was a struggling firm kept alive by weary creditors. Today, it’s the reason Nvidia’s $30,000 GPUs can crunch data fast enough to power large language models.

The secret is High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM. Regular memory is like a single-lane road feeding data to a processor. HBM stacks ultra-thin memory dies vertically, creating a multilane superhighway. For training trillion-parameter AI models, standard memory chokes; HBM keeps things moving.

SK Hynix bet early on this stacking technology, long before the AI boom. When ChatGPT lit the fuse in late 2022, Hynix already had a mature product ready to drop into Nvidia’s Hopper chips. That head start secured contracts and left rivals scrambling.

In the past year, SK Hynix’s stock has rocketed more than 920%.

Samsung’s burden of scale

Samsung, meanwhile, is learning the downside of being everywhere at once. It designs processors, builds Galaxy phones, makes OLED displays, and sells washing machines. But in the cutthroat race for AI memory, that sprawling empire slowed it down.

While SK Hynix shipped next-gen HBM3E samples, Samsung wrestled with qualification delays. Reports surfaced between March and May that its chips failed Nvidia’s heat and power tests. On top of that, June brought rare union strikes over pay — a shock for a chaebol long known for avoiding unions altogether.

Investors have sent a blunt message: They don’t want a safe, diversified giant. They want a direct pipeline into the AI boom. The big question now is whether this is a passing moment or a lasting shift.

Samsung still has deep cash reserves, a huge research and development budget, and a new semiconductor chief tasked with fixing the memory unit. If it clears Nvidia’s tests for the Rubin chips due in 2027, its sheer manufacturing muscle could reclaim the crown quickly.

Meanwhile, SK Hynix plans to list American Depositary Receipts in the United States as early as July. That could unlock fresh Western capital but also tie its fate to Wall Street’s volatile moods around AI.

For now, though, history has been made. Samsung remains a giant, but in the age of AI, it finally has competition at the very top.

Via Reuters

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