SK Hynix overtakes Samsung to become South Korea's most valuable company

SK Hynix has overtaken Samsung Electronics to become South Korea's most valuable company with a market capitalisation of 2,082.5 trillion won (about 1.35 trillion dollars), driven by its dominance in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in AI systems. SK Hynix now holds around 61 percent of the global HBM market, well ahead of Samsung's 17 percent and Micron's 21 percent, with shares rallying over 340 percent this year. The milestone underscores how surging AI demand has elevated memory chips from interchangeable commodities into critical, hard-to-replace components of AI infrastructure.