SK Hynix (000660.KS) is a publicly traded Memory company founded in 1983 and based in Icheon, South Korea.
| Date | Stage | Amount | Valuation | Lead investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 1, 1996 | IPO | — | — | — |
SK Hynix turned the AI boom into a position Samsung was supposed to own: the qualified lead supplier of HBM on Nvidia's flagship accelerators, with supply sold out ahead of production and premium contract pricing that commodity DRAM never sees. The barrier is real — HBM qualification cycles are slow, stacking know-how is hard-won, and no leading accelerator ships without the part — but it sits atop a memory oligopoly whose commodity layers still reprice with the cycle. Profits currently gush, though the balance sheet has historically carried more leverage than its peers through downturns. The grade watches Samsung and Micron qualifying into the sockets SK Hynix now monopolizes.

Worldwide EDA and SIP revenue grew 12.7% to $5.748B in Q1 2026, driven by AI chip design tool demand and a Chinese sales surge.
SK Hynix shares drop 13% following its US trading debut.

ASML faces conflicting signals as SK Hynix places a $26.5B order while Washington launches a probe.
TSMC's water recycling rate reaches 88%, far ahead of Samsung and SK Hynix at roughly 40%.

SK Hynix CEO forecasts 2027 as the worst year of the memory shortage, with supply constraints lasting through 2030.

SK hynix lists on the NYSE at a $26.5B valuation, setting a foreign IPO record for a U.S. listing.
SK Hynix's stacked high-bandwidth memory that made it the leading HBM supplier for AI accelerators. Its 12-layer HBM3E (36GB) is the workhorse memory on Nvidia's flagship GPUs, and the company has held over 50% of the HBM market through the HBM3/HBM3E generations. Co-developed closely with Nvidia, HBM3E is the 'fuel' for training trillion-parameter models and the single biggest driver of SK Hynix's record AI-era profits.
SK Hynix's next-generation HBM, debuted at CES 2026 as a 16-layer 48GB stack. HBM4 widens the memory interface and raises bandwidth and capacity to feed next-generation accelerators such as Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform. SK Hynix aims to extend its HBM market leadership into the HBM4 generation, where it competes head-to-head with Micron and Samsung for hyperscaler and AI-lab design wins.
Beyond HBM, SK Hynix supplies server DDR5, low-power LPDDR, and compact SOCAMM2 modules for AI servers, plus high-capacity enterprise NAND SSDs through its Solidigm subsidiary (the former Intel NAND business). This broad memory-and-storage portfolio lets SK Hynix serve the full AI data-center stack, from accelerator-attached HBM to bulk DRAM and QLC storage for AI datasets.
499 patents on file, but none with both an extractable figure and an abstract on Google Patents yet.