SK Hynix Overtakes Samsung as South Korea’s Most Valuable Company, For the First Time Since 2000

Samsung Electronics had held the top spot since 2000; the 26-year dominance ended on June 22, 2026, in Seoul.

South Korean chipmakers have posted record profits from surging AI data center demand by US tech giants, which has boosted memory chip demand, constrained supply, and driven up prices.

But the market is not simply rewarding South Korean memory in aggregate. It is specifically rewarding SK Hynix’s position at the center of the AI chip stack, and it is doing so at the precise moment Samsung is still scrambling to close the gap on the product that matters most. 

Why HBM Is the Difference Between 340% and 200%

According to Reuters, both Samsung and SK Hynix have surged in 2026, with SK Hynix up 340% versus Samsung’s 200%, driven largely by high-bandwidth memory (HBM). 

HBM is less like price-swingy “commodity” memory and more like a specialized component where scale, know-how, and customer qualification matter. 

Samsung is more diversified across memory, logic chips, and consumer electronics, while SK Hynix is more concentrated on memory, so a change in memory economics shows up more directly in its valuation. 

SK Hynix controls roughly 57% to 62% of the global HBM market and is the primary supplier of HBM3E for Nvidia’s H200 and GB200 GPU stacks, powering most AI data centers, including advanced AI accelerators that Google and Anthropic are currently using. 

Samsung began shipping HBM4 to Nvidia in February 2026, but has not yet closed the gap. The share price gap between Samsung and SK Hynix shows a simple reality: investors prefer proven supply relationships and working products over promises of catching up.

Although Samsung reported an eightfold profit surge in Q1 2026, the market has since concluded SK Hynix is capturing the more valuable portion of that same boom.

$1 Trillion Was Only the Beginning

In mid-May, SK Hynix was racing to the $1 trillion milestone and later completed it, joining Samsung and Micron in surpassing $1 trillion in market value for the first time, driven by the AI rally. 

Six weeks later, it added another $350 billion to reach $1.35 trillion, displacing the company that defined South Korean corporate identity for a generation. 

Ahead of this milestone, analysis projected SK Hynix could reach $1.8 trillion by year-end if AI infrastructure spending continues at the pace of big tech’s $635 billion capex commitments.

A US listing could further strengthen SK Hynix’s position. Reuters noted SK Hynix is considering a US listing, which would expand access to global investors, as some institutional managers find US-listed equities easier to hold and trade than Korea-listed stocks. 

At $1.35 trillion and still rising, SK Hynix no longer needs the US listing to be considered among the world’s most valuable technology companies. But it would make that status permanent in the market infrastructure that sets global valuations.

Samsung held the top spot in Seoul for 26 years. How long SK Hynix holds it will depend on whether HBM’s structural advantage over commodity memory persists and whether Samsung’s HBM4 ramp delivers the promised volumes.

Source: SK Hynix overtakes Samsung to become South Korea’s most valuable company