The AI chip frenzy is creating a new trillion-dollar contender
The AI chip frenzy is creating a new trillion-dollar contender
Huileng TanThu, May 14, 2026 at 6:10 AM UTC
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Investors are piling into memory-chip makers like SK Hynix as AI companies race to build more powerful data centers.SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg/Getty Images -
SK Hynix's stock price has surged more than 200% this year, pushing it toward the trillion-dollar club.
The South Korean company is benefiting from soaring demand for AI memory chips used by Nvidia.
South Korea's stock market is riding the AI boom, with Samsung recently topping a $1 trillion valuation.
The AI boom is turning memory chips — long viewed as a cyclical corner of the semiconductor industry — into one of the market's hottest trades.
One of the standout winners from the trend is South Korea's Samsung Electronics, whose market value hit the $1 trillion level last week. The stock is over 140% higher this year.
This week, another South Korean chip giant is emerging as a contender for the milestone.
Shares of SK Hynix have surged more than 200% this year as demand explodes for high-bandwidth memory, the specialized chips used in AI systems.
The company's stunning stock gains have pushed its market cap to about 1,395.5 trillion South Korean won, or $935 billion.
SK Hynix is a top memory chip supplier to Nvidia, whose AI accelerators have become the backbone of the AI race.
SK Hynix's stock gains come as companies rush to build AI data centers and investors increasingly look beyond the firms that design AI models toward the hardware powering them.
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"Memory is becoming one of the clearest beneficiaries of AI hardware demand," Charu Chanana, the chief investment strategist at Saxo, wrote on Tuesday.
Demand is rising as AI models grow larger and applications require more computing power and memory to handle increasingly complex workloads, Chanana added.
That shift is reshaping markets far beyond Silicon Valley.
The newly launched Roundhill Memory ETF, which trades under the ticker DRAM, has quickly become one of Wall Street's hottest AI trades, nearly doubling since its April 2 launch.
The fund holds companies including Micron, Samsung Electronics, Sandisk, and SK Hynix.
The surge in memory-chip stocks has also fueled a broader rally in South Korea, with the Kospi — the country's benchmark stock index — hitting record highs this month. The index is over 80% higher this year.
The market is so hot that Goldman Sachs recently called South Korea its "highest conviction view" in Asia, citing the country's dominance in memory chips and exposure to booming AI infrastructure demand.
on Business Insider
Source: “AOL Money”
