#SK海力士市值登顶韩股 A company that almost went bankrupt, with a market value surpassing Bitcoin

On June 22, SK Hynix's stock price rose, pushing its market capitalization to $1.35 trillion, exceeding Bitcoin's total market value of about $1.29 trillion, and during trading, it temporarily overtook Samsung Electronics to become Korea's most valuable company.
According to Coinglass data, in the global asset rankings, SK Hynix rose to 16th place, while Bitcoin slipped to 18th.
HBM, and a 13-year bet
The core driver of SK Hynix's recent surge is HBM (High Bandwidth Memory).
AI training and inference demand extremely high memory bandwidth, and SK Hynix is NVIDIA's main HBM supplier, with a market share exceeding 60%. Financial reports show SK Hynix's Q1 revenue was 52.58 trillion won, operating profit was 37.61 trillion won, with a profit margin of 72%.
Analysts currently expect SK Hynix's Q2 operating profit to be around 62-65 trillion won, with some brokerages' optimistic forecasts raised to over 68 trillion won. In early April this year, market expectations for Q2 mostly remained in the 50 trillion won range, but as memory prices continued to stay strong, brokerages widely revised their forecasts upward. Management stated at the earnings call that the structural memory shortage brought by AI will last for several years at least, and plans to significantly increase capital expenditure to expand advanced capacity.
It is reported that SK Hynix has been betting on HBM technology since 2009, when the market paid little attention to this complex technology with limited initial demand. From the first generation HBM to HBM3E, this high-stakes gamble has lasted nearly 13 years, until the emergence of ChatGPT, which marked its crowning moment.
SK Hynix's current position is inseparable from a key external aid. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, Hynix was plunged into a debt crisis, with its stock price falling to junk status, and even negotiations with Micron Technology to sell the company ended in failure. Over the next decade, the company was under long-term creditor control. In 2012, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won overruled opposition from the board and acquired Hynix through its investment holding subsidiary SK Square for about $3 billion, rebranding it as SK Hynix, and injected large-scale R&D funds. This investment allowed the company to continue advancing HBM technology, which was still a niche market at the time.
Currently, SK Square owns about 20% of SK Hynix, making it its largest single shareholder. Notably, SK Square has also attempted to enter the crypto market. In 2021, it acquired a 35% stake in Korean crypto exchange Korbit for about 90 billion won and planned to issue its own token, SK Coin. Public reports indicate that after the Terra/LUNA collapse in 2022, the market cooled sharply, and SK Coin's issuance plan was shelved, with no substantial progress since. According to Reuters, citing sources, SK Hynix plans to go public on Nasdaq as early as August this year, which would lower trading barriers for US institutions and passive funds, potentially further attracting capital inflows.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently stated that future collaboration between NVIDIA and SK Hynix could bring hundreds of billions of dollars in business opportunities to Korea.
Why is capital paying? The mirror of Crypto AI
In this wave of AI, the market is more willing to pay premiums for segments with actual orders and visible supply bottlenecks.
Compute power, memory, electricity—assets directly involved in AI supply—are prioritized because their revenues are quantifiable and barriers verifiable. HBM capacity is highly concentrated among SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron, with expansion cycles lasting 2 to 3 years. This physical scarcity is not built on narratives but is locked in by capacity cycles and technological barriers.
The valuation logic in the storage industry is shifting from "cyclical stocks" to "growth stocks."
SK Hynix's market cap surpassing Bitcoin is a public statement from the capital market about two kinds of scarcity. The physical barriers are so high that the situation of Crypto AI deserves re-examination. Over the past two years, the Crypto AI track has been telling a story: decentralized computing power will reshape AI infrastructure, and open networks will surpass closed enterprise data centers. The potential of this direction is real, but in light of SK Hynix's current market value, several realities must be faced.
The IC3 report jointly released by 13 universities including Cornell University states that the integration of Crypto and AI is still in its early stages, and the hype around this intersection has overshadowed actual progress. Decentralized computing, data markets, and governance mostly remain in conceptual stages. At the project level, for example, Bittensor, the most representative project in the Crypto AI track, saw its token TAO decline 20% over the past three months. Bittensor co-founder const posted on X that the project's economic incentives are still primarily driven by the core team, who choose to maintain centralization for rapid iteration, and it will take another year and a half to complete the core mechanism. In other words, their underlying mechanisms are still being patched.
Closer to hardware, crypto mining companies are also not in an easy situation. According to Galaxy Research data, Bitcoin miners are entering a "surrender phase," with current network mining difficulty down over 20% from its historical high, the largest retracement since China's crackdown on Bitcoin mining in 2021, with some miners continuing to exit the network or shut down equipment.
In pursuit of transformation, mining companies like Core Scientific, TeraWulf, and Hut 8 have announced entry into AI and high-performance computing. But according to VanEck, this transition faces a short-term funding gap of about $50 billion, with long-term capital needs around $221 billion, and only about 25% of leased AI capacity has been delivered—companies missing construction milestones are facing downgrades by investors.
On the funding side, Arthur Hayes recently pointed out in his article "Reality Test" that since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, the AI industry has issued about $1.5 trillion in debt, roughly matching the increase in US dollar M2 during the same period—AI has almost absorbed all new liquidity, and Bitcoin has never had such an opportunity.
Hayes believes this is not just "AI losing capital and flowing back into crypto." The upcoming large IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI will further siphon market funds. Once the AI bubble bursts, bank credit tightening will also restrict liquidity, and Bitcoin will be sold off along with AI.
Since the second half of last year, many traders who were active in the crypto market have shifted their focus to US stocks and Korean stocks, chasing AI hardware trends. The logic behind capital flowing into AI infrastructure is simple and straightforward: real orders, physical barriers, quantifiable profit margins. This certainty is the fundamental reason why current capital is willing to pay high premiums, while the crypto market's AI narrative lacks this certainty. In other words, the current AI infrastructure's dividends are more likely to be captured by entities with technological barriers and real supply capabilities. Crypto networks need to better define their position in the value chain during this process.