Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix surged over 9% today as the AI bubble fears eased, with the semiconductor industries and AI hyperscalers experiencing fresh demand for memory chips. These South Korean firms are the world’s biggest memory chip (DRAM) producers, who together dominate 67% of the market share.
Samsung Electronics Co climbed to KRW 167,200 today, marking a 11.17% gain, while SK Hynix is at KRW 906,000, marking a 9.16% gain. The ongoing AI demand and hyperscalers expanding their data centres aggressively have led to a memory crunch. The fresh wave of AI optimism has investors betting on High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) producers, driving their prices up.
Riding the Wave of Memory Demand: World’s Biggest HBM Producers to Win Big
The memory crunch that led consumer PC builders to roll down the specs of their mid-tier devices was one of the most discussed tech topics in 2025. When AI data centers started to scale at unprecedented rates, memory manufacturers started to focus on building memory for them, leaving PC manufacturers fighting for scraps.
The DDR5 shortage had many PC builders rolling down configs from 32GB-16GB to 16GB-8GB. AI data centres continue to gobble up most of the 70% memory produced. Samsung announced that it will halt SAT SSD production in January 2026 and is focusing on the production of high-profit HBM for AI enterprises.
Samsung’s and SK Hynix’s Critical Role in the AI Data Centre Pipeline
AI data centres are immensely resource-heavy; they need megawatts of electricity, high-end GPU stacks, towers of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) to support GPU processing speed, and extensive cooling systems. Amazon has committed $125 billion to hyperscaling, followed by Google’s $92 billion, and Meta’s $72 billion. Statistics suggest that AI data centres will see investments above $602B in the coming years.
In short, the AI data centre business is booming, and all critical elements in the pipeline stand to benefit. NVIDIA has the prime position in this pipeline as its GPUs are in high demand. NVIDIA crossed the $4 trillion market capitalization in 2025, grew 1260% in the last five years, and now tops the Nasdaq 100 with a 12.93% weightage.
NVIDIA’s GPUs will bottleneck without High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chips that determine their performance. Memory shortage is often a constraint that slashes the GPU performance, delaying data fetch time. This renders HBM critical for data centres.
SK Hynix is mass-producing HBM3E and HBM4, targeting Nvidia’s most powerful Rubin series chips. Samsung is also ramping up the same and similar chips with high compatibility with the latest GPUs used in most data centres.
Explosive 2025 Rally of Korean Memory Powerhouses
The Korean economy is generally having a good time by virtue of AI growth. Companies like Samsung and SK Hynix showed enormous growth in 2025. Samsung Electronics’ share price grew 227.79% last year, while SK Hynix grew 373.63%. The new wave of impetus for memory is likely to rally these stocks through 2026.
Analyst Take
Analysts from Goldman Sachs see a 22.39% upside for Samsung with a target price of KRW 205,000. JPMorgan predicts even higher, an upside of 43.28% with a target of KRW 240,000. Today’s rally and analyst endorsements are likely to send Samsung’s stock prices higher.
JPMorgan projects 37.82% upside for SK Hynix, with the target set at KRW 1,250,000. The average target price for SK Hynix from 37 Wall Street analysts is KRW 1,090,689. With the AI supercycle continuing, the Korean chipmakers will continue to be critical in the global tech pipeline. Investors now closely watch for the next earnings report of both companies, scheduled for April 2026.
