SK Hynix Surpasses Samsung as South Korea’s Most Valuable Company South Korea’s corporate landscape has been upended, as longtime champion Samsung Electronics is suddenly eclipsed by a former debtor on the brink: SK Hynix. The turning point reflects how the global AI race is rewriting the rules of the memory-chip business.

The story begins more than two decades ago, when what is now SK Hynix was struggling under crippling debt and “almost collapsed” before being restructured and refocused. In the years that followed, Samsung cemented itself as South Korea’s most valuable company, holding the top spot in market capitalization continuously since 2000.

The dynamic started to shift during a memory industry downturn around 2023. While many chipmakers pulled back, SK Hynix doubled down on high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a specialized type of memory stacked vertically for faster performance and lower power consumption and tightly integrated with AI processors. That bet looked risky as SK Hynix posted a multibillion-dollar operating loss amid falling memory prices.

But as Big Tech accelerated AI infrastructure spending, the company emerged as a critical supplier of HBM chips to AI system builders including Nvidia and Google. By 2025, SK Hynix commanded 61% of the global HBM market, far ahead of Samsung’s 17% share, fundamentally changing its economic position.

The market finally registered this shift in June 2026. On June 22, SK Hynix’s shares jumped 5.6%, pushing its value to roughly $1.35 trillion and making it the world’s most valuable memory chipmaker, narrowly ahead of Samsung Electronics. On the same day, Samsung’s stock edged down, ending its long run as South Korea’s most valuable company. As one account put it, “Samsung is no longer South Korea’s most valuable company… That’s one heck of a comeback for SK Hynix.”

Today, SK Hynix’s rise is widely seen as a symbol of how AI-focused components like HBM can overturn long-standing industry hierarchies—and how a once-distressed chipmaker turned an aggressive, high-risk investment into market dominance.

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