SK Hynix market cap surpasses 1,000 trillion KRW! Stock price surges 11% in a single day, AI memory demand supports $710 billion valuation

On May 4, SK Hynix shares surged 11% in a single day, breaking through the 1.4 million KRW mark. The company's market capitalization crossed the 1,000 trillion KRW (approximately 710 billion USD) threshold for the first time, setting a new record in South Korean corporate history. Q1 2026 operating profit reached 37.6 trillion KRW (26.7 billion USD), also rewriting the quarterly record for the semiconductor industry. The driving force behind this is the structural supply gap of HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) amid explosive demand from AI data centers. Source: Seoul Economic Daily, Korea Herald, CNBC; reported by BlockTempo. (Previous coverage: SK Hynix Q1 operating margin hits 72%, setting the highest quarterly record in semiconductor industry history) (Background: South Korean youth move away from crypto, flocking to Samsung and SK Hynix; replicating the "TSMC faith" seen in Taiwan?) On May 4, SK Hynix closed up 11% on the Seoul Exchange, with its stock price officially breaking through the 1.4 million KRW integer barrier, accompanied by a surge in daily trading volume. As the stock price soared, the company's market cap exceeded 1,000 trillion KRW (approx. 710 billion USD) for the first time, marking an unprecedented milestone in South Korean corporate history. This rally is supported by strong financial results: Q1 2026 quarterly operating profit reached 37.6103 trillion KRW (approx. 26.7 billion USD), not only setting a personal record but also pushing Q1 quarterly revenue past 50 trillion KRW—a nearly threefold increase compared to the same period last year—allowing the market to fully digest the "AI chip super-cycle" thesis. HBM: The True Engine of This Rally The explosion of SK Hynix is rooted in its global leadership in HBM. HBM is a critical memory component for AI data center training and inference servers; every computing monster like NVIDIA H100 or B200 requires HBM stacking. In this market, SK Hynix and Samsung together monopolize nearly 90% of the supply, with SK Hynix widely recognized by the industry for its technological lead. As previously reported by BlockTempo, SK Hynix's Q1 2026 operating margin reached 72%, the highest quarterly profit margin in the history of the semiconductor industry—for every 100 units sold, 72 are profit, a figure almost unheard of in manufacturing. More importantly, this supply gap is not short-term. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won clearly stated in March 2026 that the wafer shortage will persist until 2030. HBM demand continues to outstrip supply, and capacity expansion requires a four-to-five-year construction cycle, with the gap estimated to exceed 20%. In other words, this is not a one-quarter earnings hype, but a structural supply-demand imbalance story with at least four years of deterministic narrative ahead. Meanwhile, BlockTempo has observed an interesting social phenomenon: South Korean youth are shifting from cryptocurrency exchanges to the stock market, with massive capital flowing into Samsung and SK Hynix, replicating the "faith-based holding" model that Taiwanese youth have for TSMC. BlockTempo Perspective: A Mirror of Sector Rotation SK Hynix's trillion-won market cap is a microcosm of a larger landscape. This year, South Korea's top ten conglomerates added approximately 1,500 trillion KRW in total market cap, with SK Group leading the pack. For cryptocurrency readers, this figure has a more direct significance: Upbit, as South Korea's largest crypto exchange, has reportedly seen its trading volume shrink by over 80% from its peak this year, as a large amount of South Korean retail capital is moving out of the crypto market and into AI semiconductor concept stocks represented by SK Hynix. This is a real-time capital sector rotation—not the antithesis of the crypto market, but the migration of the same group of capital seeking high risk and high returns between different narrative cycles. The beneficiaries of the AI chip supply chain are extremely broad: from HBM memory to advanced packaging, from TSMC to SK Hynix, this supply chain is becoming one of the most certain technological main themes of this decade, and the speed of its market cap expansion is identical to the logic behind the 2021 crypto bull market explosion. Source: Seoul Economic Daily, Korea Herald, CNBC; reported by BlockTempo.