HBM Gold Rush: SK Hynix & Micron Rocket into the $1 Trillion Club
If you laughed at memory stock investors in 2024, calling DRAM a cyclical and boring industry, today they will roll down the window of their brand-new Maybach and smile: "Thanks to NVIDIA, our sand now sells for the price of gold."
"On May 26, 2026, semiconductor history was rewritten. SK Hynix (000660.KS) crossed 2,325,000 KRW (~$1.25 Trillion market cap) and Micron (MU) rocketed past $923.52 (~$1.01 Trillion market cap). The two memory chip makers have officially entered the $1 Trillion club."
AI Devours Everything, and HBM Devours the AI Budget
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM3e and HBM4) is the speedway feeding NVIDIA's Blackwell GPUs. Without HBM, the graphics cards sit idle. As a result, SK Hynix and Micron share a incredibly lucrative duopoly on the HBM supply chain.
Silicon Alchemy: Stacking Wafers 12-Layers High
HBM is a micro-engineering masterpiece. Stacking 12 layers of silicon wafers thinner than paper and connecting them via TSV (Through-Silicon Vias) thinner than hair is extremely hard to build. However, those who master it print absolute cash.
Conclusion
No matter how smart AI models get, physical laws dictate they need storage. The trillion-dollar market caps of H Hynix and Micron prove once again: in a gold rush, the big money isn't made by the gold miners, but by the ones selling the shovels.