SK Hynix Dethrones Samsung as South Korea's Most Valuable Company After 25 Years

SK Hynix surpassed Samsung Electronics on Monday to become South Korea's most valuable listed company — ending a dominance Samsung had held virtually uninterrupted since November 2000. The shift marks a landmark moment in the country's technology landscape, and a direct consequence of the global race to build AI infrastructure.

SK Hynix's market capitalization reached 2,080.38 trillion won (approximately $1.35 trillion), edging past Samsung's 2,066.66 trillion won by a margin of roughly 13.72 trillion won. The day's trading also pushed the KOSPI benchmark index to a new closing high above 9,100, reflecting the broader semiconductor-driven market rally.

The reversal has been years in the making. While both South Korean chipmakers benefited from the AI hardware boom, SK Hynix positioned itself far more aggressively in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) — the stacked chip architecture that Nvidia and other AI accelerator makers require for training and running large language models. SK Hynix currently supplies the majority of HBM chips used in Nvidia's H100 and H200 series, the hardware backbone of most enterprise AI deployments.

Samsung, by contrast, has struggled to qualify its HBM3E chips for Nvidia's supply chain. Multiple reports this year indicated Samsung's HBM3E product failed to meet Nvidia's thermal and performance requirements, forcing the company to cede ground to SK Hynix and Micron in one of the semiconductor industry's fastest-growing segments.

The symbolic weight of the milestone should not be understated. Samsung first overtook rivals to claim the top KOSPI spot on July 29, 1999, and held it almost continuously from November 21, 2000 — a 25-year stretch that coincided with Samsung's transformation into a global electronics giant spanning smartphones, displays, DRAM, and NAND storage.

Analysts see SK Hynix's ascent as confirmation that the next chapter of the semiconductor industry will be written in AI memory, not consumer electronics. "The AI infrastructure buildout has created a clear divergence," one Seoul-based chip analyst noted, pointing to the compound annual growth rates in HBM versus conventional DRAM.

Whether the shift is permanent remains an open question. Samsung is investing heavily in HBM4 and next-generation packaging technologies, and the company's sheer scale across foundry, NAND, and logic chips gives it resilience SK Hynix lacks. But for now, South Korea's 25-year pecking order has been upended, as reported by The Korea Times.