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SK Hynix’s stock price has soared more than 200% this year, heading towards the trillion-dollar club.
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The South Korean company has benefited from surging demand for artificial intelligence memory chips used by Nvidia.
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South Korea’s stock market is riding the artificial intelligence boom, with Samsung’s valuation recently surpassing $1 trillion.
The artificial intelligence boom is turning memory chips, long seen as a cyclical corner of the semiconductor industry, into one of the hottest deals in the market.
One of the standout winners from this trend is South Korea’s Samsung Electronics, whose market capitalization hit the $1 trillion level last week. The stock is up more than 140% this year.
This week, another South Korean chip giant is emerging as a contender for the milestone.
Shares of SK Hynix have soared more than 200% this year as demand for high-bandwidth memory, specialized chips used in artificial intelligence systems, surges.
The stunning gains in the company’s shares have brought its market value to about 1,395.5 trillion won, or $935 billion.
SK Hynix is Nvidia’s top memory chip supplier, and its artificial intelligence accelerator has become a mainstay in the artificial intelligence competition.
The rise in SK Hynix shares comes as companies rush to build artificial intelligence data centers and investors increasingly look beyond the companies designing artificial intelligence models to the hardware that powers them.
“Memory is emerging as one of the most obvious beneficiaries of AI hardware demand,” Charu Chanana, chief investment strategist at Saxo Bank, wrote on Tuesday.
Chanana added that demand is growing as AI models become larger and applications require more computing power and memory to handle increasingly complex workloads.
This shift is reshaping markets beyond Silicon Valley.
The newly launched Roundhill Memory ETF (ticker DRAM) has quickly become one of Wall Street’s hottest artificial intelligence trades, nearly doubling since its launch on April 2.
The fund holds companies such as Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, Sandisk and SK Hynix.
The surge in memory chip stocks has also contributed to South Korea’s overall gains, with the country’s benchmark stock index Kospi hitting a record high this month. The index is up more than 80% this year.
The market is so hot that Goldman Sachs recently called South Korea the “most confident view” in Asia, citing the country’s dominance of memory chips and booming demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Read the original article on Business Insider
