A Historic Shift on the Korea Exchange
For the first time in 26 years, South Korea has a new most valuable company. SK Hynix overtook Samsung Electronics in market capitalization on Monday, June 22, 2026, seizing the top spot on the Korea Exchange that Samsung had held since November 2000.
SK Hynix shares closed up 5.6%, lifting its market capitalization to approximately 2,080.4 trillion won (.36 trillion), according to Reuters data. Samsung's common shares stood at roughly 2,051 trillion won — though Samsung remains larger when preferred shares (worth around 180 trillion won) are included. On common stock alone, however, the bellwether has definitively shifted.
The milestone marks one of the most dramatic reversals of fortune in Asian corporate history. SK Hynix, once on the verge of being sold to Micron in 2002 after being crippled by debt, has transformed into the world's most valuable memory chipmaker through a decisive bet on AI hardware.
The AI Memory Boom That Rewrote the Rankings
The cause is not in dispute: high-bandwidth memory (HBM). SK Hynix has spent two years as the dominant supplier of HBM3E chips — the stacked memory modules that sit beside Nvidia's AI accelerators, feeding them data fast enough to keep pace with demanding AI training workloads.
SK Hynix now controls an estimated 61% of the global HBM market, far ahead of Samsung's 17% and Micron's 21%. This commanding position made it the principal beneficiary of the AI infrastructure build-out that has seen Nvidia and its ecosystem invest hundreds of billions in data center hardware.
Samsung, by contrast, has spent the current cycle playing catch-up in exactly the product that matters most. The company has been working to qualify its own HBM for Nvidia's platforms and is expected to win a larger slice of next-generation HBM4 orders, but for now it has watched a rival it once dwarfed close the distance and then cross it.
Market Concentration and the KOSPI Effect
SK Hynix and Samsung between them now account for roughly half of the KOSPI index's entire value — a concentration that giveth and taketh away. It lifted the index to record levels on Monday, but it also means a single soft quarter in memory demand could drag the entire market down.
This realignment in the semiconductor world dovetails with rising memory costs that have reshaped the broader tech landscape, from smartphone pricing to server procurement. Meanwhile, competitors like AMD and Intel are racing to capture their own slice of the AI compute opportunity.
What's Next for SK Hynix?
Investor optimism extends beyond the current quarter. SK Hynix is reportedly preparing a U.S. listing of American depositary receipts (ADRs) as early as next month — a move expected to raise up to 40 trillion won (6.5 billion) and give international investors a cleaner way to own the stock without trading in Seoul.
The chipmaker has also deepened its strategic partnership with Nvidia. At Computex 2026 earlier this month, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appeared together at SK Hynix's booth, signaling a relationship that has moved beyond supplier-customer into full-fledged strategic alliance territory. SK Hynix's HBM4 is already slated for integration into Nvidia's upcoming Rubin GPU platform.
Whether SK Hynix can hold the crown depends on one question: how long the appetite for AI memory holds. For now, the company that was nearly sold off 24 years ago stands atop South Korea's corporate pyramid — and the AI revolution shows no signs of slowing down.
Originally published on TekMag
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