The AI boom is turning memory chips \u2014 long viewed as a cyclical corner of the semiconductor industry \u2014 into one of the market’s hottest trades.<\/p>\n
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One of the standout winners from the trend is South Korea’s Samsung Electronics,<\/a> whose market value hit the $1 trillion level last week. The stock is over 140% higher this year.<\/p>\n This week, another South Korean chip giant is emerging as a contender for the milestone.<\/p>\n Shares of SK Hynix<\/a> have surged more than 200% this year as demand explodes for high-bandwidth memory, the specialized chips used in AI systems.<\/p>\n The company’s stunning stock gains have pushed its market cap to about 1,395.5 trillion South Korean won, or $935 billion.<\/p>\n SK Hynix is a top memory chip supplier to Nvidia, whose AI accelerators have become the backbone of the AI race.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “Memory is becoming one of the clearest beneficiaries of AI hardware demand,” Charu Chanana, the chief investment strategist at Saxo, wrote on Tuesday.<\/p>\n Demand is rising as AI models grow larger and applications require more computing power and memory to handle increasingly complex workloads, Chanana added.<\/p>\n That shift is reshaping markets far beyond Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n