Fire, Fab Frenzy, and a $1 Trillion Threshold: Inside SK Hynix's Breakneck Week
Veröffentlicht: 03.06.2026 um 10:41 Uhr, Redaktion boerse-global.de
The siren had barely fallen silent at SK Hynix’s Cheongju complex before the market cap kept climbing. On June 1, a fire in a gas chamber on the sixth floor of Campus 4 triggered an evacuation of 3,600 workers and a hydrogen fluoride release, yet the company’s stock barely flinched. Within 24 hours, SK Hynix had breached the $1 trillion market-capitalisation barrier, closing in on a record high at roughly $1.06 trillion.
Seven employees were sent to the on-site hospital — five with eye irritation, two for precautionary checks — but production at the linked M15 and M15X fabs never stopped. Automatic sprinklers doused the flames before they could threaten DRAM or NAND output, and analysts saw no supply-chain impact. The fire’s cause remains under investigation.
What did rattle the industry was a very different kind of heat. At the Computex trade show in Taipei the next day, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won announced a strategic U-turn: the company will double total wafer production capacity within five years. Only three months earlier, at Nvidia’s GTC, Chey had said such an expansion wasn’t on the cards. Now he conceded that “there are many obstacles, but we will overcome them.”
The catalyst is HBM — High Bandwidth Memory, the specialised DRAM that powers Nvidia’s AI accelerators. SK Hynix, which already supplies the bulk of HBM3E chips to Jensen Huang’s firm, confirmed that its entire HBM output for 2026 is sold out. Customers have reportedly offered to buy EUV lithography scanners and pre-finance new production lines just to secure capacity that is effectively zero in the spot market.
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Chey underscored the structural nature of the shortage, warning it could persist through 2030. Every AI accelerator consumes far more wafer real estate than traditional DRAM, and industry-wide supply lags demand by more than 20%. Gartner analyst Shrish Pant sees no meaningful price correction before the end of 2027. Greyhound Research calls the shift a permanent reallocation of the memory market rather than a cyclical spike. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, raised its 2028 operating profit forecast for SK Hynix by 24%, to the equivalent of roughly $300 billion — a figure that underscores just how aggressive the earnings trajectory has become.
The numbers for the first quarter of 2026 back up the hype. Revenue hit a record 52.58 trillion won, the first time the quarterly figure has crossed the 50 trillion won threshold. Operating profit soared 405% year-on-year to 37.61 trillion won, generating a margin of 72% — also a historic high. HBM chips now represent roughly 30% of total DRAM shipments by volume, and their share of DRAM revenue is expected to reach 41% this year. SK Hynix alone commands 58% of the HBM market.
On the Computex show floor, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered the most vivid endorsement yet. Walking up to an SK Hynix display, he grabbed a marker and scrawled “Please Make More” across a HBM4E wafer. The message was directed at the company that is critical to Nvidia’s next-generation “Vera Rubin” system, which is slated to reach full production in the second half of 2026. Chey confirmed he wants SK Hynix to be the principal memory supplier for that platform and hinted at deepening partnerships with Taiwanese firms beyond TSMC.
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Yet the ride has not been one-way. Over the 18 trading sessions through early June, foreign investors offloaded a net 60 trillion won (roughly $43 billion) in South Korean equities, with 83% of those sales concentrated in SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics. Analysts chalked up the selling to tactical profit-taking after the recent rally, not a structural retreat from the semiconductor sector. In Frankfurt, SK Hynix depositary receipts edged up 0.72% on Wednesday, trading at €1,385.00.
Looking ahead, SK Hynix plans to deliver samples of its seventh-generation HBM4E memory in the second half of 2026, with mass production starting in 2027. The company also finds itself locked in a development race with Samsung for HBM5, a battle that will likely determine which Korean giant defines the market’s next chapter. For now, though, the message from Taipei — and from Cheongju — is unmistakable: the era of one trillion dollar memory has begun.
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