NVIDIA's support! South Korea's second largest chaebol SK Hynix comes back to life and surpasses Samsung, with a market capitalization soaring to $84 billion.

NVIDIA’s AI chip has become an invincible armor. Whoever gets NVIDIA’s order will possess an indestructible body. SK Hynix Inc has long been overshadowed by Samsung, picking up the resources left by Samsung to become the second largest. According to Bloomberg, this situation has recently reversed, and SK Hynix has become NVIDIA’s main partner, supplying high-bandwidth memory HBM compatible with NVIDIA GPU, dealing a heavy blow to Samsung.

The ups and downs of the life of Chey Tae Won, chairman of SK Group, are as dramatic as Korean dramas, and his ex-wife is Roh So-young, the daughter of former South Korean President Roh Tae-woo, a very typical political and business marriage combining chaebol and politics. Later, Choi Tae-won was divorced by his ex-wife who learned of the extramarital affair and was required to pay what is said to be the highest divorce compensation in Korean history, and Roh So-young demanded up to $1.042 billion in damages from Choi Tae-won. Choi Tae-won was also indicted and imprisoned by a South Korean court for misappropriating tens of billions of won of company funds, and served in prison like Samsung heir Jay Y. Lee.

Tony Choi Tai-yuan, whose English name is Tony, acquired SK Hynix in 2012. SK Hynix, formerly known as Hyundai Electronics Co., was established in 1983. Due to a sharp decline in DRAM prices, the company incurred heavy losses and debts. Tony Choi Tai-yuan’s acquisition of SK Hynix was not initially well-received, but now it has proven to be a wise move.

The key to SK Hynix’s ability to make a comeback lies in continuing to develop high-bandwidth memory HBM. Samsung’s senior management did not pay attention to this technology, and even disbanded their HBM team, effectively handing over the gold mine to SK Hynix. When OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of 2022 and caused a wave of AI chip purchases, SK Hynix was ready to take advantage of the situation.

SK Hynix has been selected as a major supplier by Nvidia. The market capitalization has surged to 117 trillion Korean won (approximately 84 billion US dollars), rising more than 110% since early 2023.

Samsung’s scale is still three times that of SK Hynix, but it lags behind in developing HBM technology, and needs to obtain approval from Nvidia. Meanwhile, SK Hynix is taking advantage of the situation.

In order to maintain its advantage, SK Hynix offers more bonuses and benefits than Samsung to encourage existing employees and attract talents from larger companies. SK Hynix’s engineers proudly say that HBM represents the best reserve force of Hynix.

This article is boosted by Nvidia! South Korea’s second-largest chaebol, SK Hynix, surpasses Samsung, with a market cap soaring to $84 billion, first appearing on Chain News ABMedia.