SK Hynix Hits Record High as Intel Earnings Boost AI Chip Demand

SK Hynix surged more than 7% to a record high on Monday after Intel’s latest earnings revived bets that AI demand will keep the memory market tight. The move put the Nvidia supplier ahead of Samsung Electronics, which rose 2.5% but lagged as investors judged SK Hynix had the cleaner exposure to high-bandwidth memory, the high-value chips feeding AI servers and cloud infrastructure.

The rally was not built on one trading session alone. On April 23, SK Hynix said first-quarter profit had hit a record and jumped five-fold from a year earlier, while warning that AI-chip demand would outstrip manufacturing capacity. A day earlier, it announced plans to spend 19 trillion won, or $12.85 billion, on a new advanced-packaging plant in South Korea, with construction starting this month. Together, those signals told the market that management sees the shortage in advanced memory lasting long enough to justify fresh capital and higher prices.

Samsung, by contrast, entered the week with labor risk hanging over operations. Unionized workers authorized a strike on March 18, and 40,000 employees rallied on April 23 ahead of a planned 18-day strike from May 21 if no deal is reached. The union says a chip worker with a base salary of 76 million won would receive 38 million won in bonus pay for 2025, less than a third of what a similarly paid SK Hynix worker would qualify for. A Samsung official has warned that even a single strike could damage customer trust and take years to recover from, a reminder that supply reliability now matters as much as raw output.

The market reaction underscored how AI spending in the United States continues to ripple through South Korea’s semiconductor supply chain. Intel’s results were enough to reinforce the view that demand for advanced memory is still outrunning supply, at least in the parts of the market where SK Hynix is strongest. SK Hynix’s outlook also implied favorable pricing conditions should continue for both DRAM and NAND flash.

Samsung remains a giant across semiconductors, but SK Hynix is increasingly being valued as the purer AI memory play. That shift says as much about the semiconductor cycle as it does about one day of trading: investors are rewarding the companies most tightly linked to high-bandwidth memory, advanced packaging and the narrow set of products that AI data centers cannot do without.