SK Hynix Marries Custom Memory Strategy with Seoul's EUV Fast Track as Record Cash Piles Up

SK Hynix reports record $40.3T won profit, pivots to custom HBM for AI, plans capacity doubling, gets analyst upgrades despite fire-induced dip.

SK Hynix is rewriting its playbook. The South Korean memory giant posted a staggering net profit of 40.3 trillion won on revenue of 52.6 trillion won in the first quarter of 2026, its best quarter ever. But what’s catching investors’ attention isn’t just the numbers—it’s a strategic pivot that shifts the company from a commodity supplier to a design partner for the world’s most advanced AI chips. At the NVIDIA GTC Taipei 2026 conference, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung unveiled plans to deliver customized High-Bandwidth Memory (cHBM), tailored to individual customer architectures, alongside next-generation technologies like HBM4, High Bandwidth Flash, and 3D stacked DRAM on Logic.

This repositioning comes as the company scales capacity at breakneck speed. Chey told the Computex audience in Taipei that SK Hynix aims to double its manufacturing capacity over the next five years, warning that memory shortages could persist until 2030. The ambition is to become the primary HBM supplier for Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin AI platform. SK Hynix already commands a 58% share of the global HBM market, according to Counterpoint Research, far ahead of Samsung and Micron at 21% each.

Seoul is greasing the skids. The South Korean trade ministry slashed the approval process for EUV lithography equipment from 34 days to as few as nine, reclassifying these machines as “specified equipment” rather than high-pressure gas production units. The change cuts inspection costs by roughly 340,000 euros per machine, giving SK Hynix a clear time-to-market advantage as it races to bring new fabs online. The company’s heavy investment plans for 2026—focused on the M15X ramp-up, the Yongin cluster infrastructure, and EUV tools—are now more feasible.

Wall Street is taking notice. Goldman Sachs raised its price target for SK Hynix to 3.5 million won on June 1, maintaining a Buy rating and lifting its 2028 earnings forecast by 24%. The bank sees a structurally longer boom in DRAM, NAND, and HBM markets, with supply tightness lasting through 2028. Meanwhile, Richard Clode, co-manager of the Janus Henderson Global Technology Leaders Fund, said he plans to add SK Hynix to his portfolio, arguing that its HBM dominance will deliver above-average profit growth as long-term supply contracts are renegotiated at higher prices.

None of this prevented a sharp morning dip on Tuesday. A fire at the Cheongju campus—which the company said did not affect production—triggered a 4% sell-off in early trade, dragging the broader KOSPI down more than 2%. Yet the stock quickly recovered to around 2.36 million won, barely below its all-time high from the prior session. The shares have surged 63% over the past month and 248% year-to-date. The relative strength index sits at 68.9, short of overbought territory, while volatility at 77.8% reflects the high-octane nature of the AI memory market.

Behind the short-term noise, SK Hynix’s balance sheet provides a formidable cushion. Cash holdings swelled to 54.3 trillion won, up 19.4 trillion from the previous quarter, while interest-bearing debt fell to 19.3 trillion won, leaving net cash of 35 trillion won. That war chest is already earmarked for higher capital spending in 2026. As the company embeds its memory technologies deeper into Nvidia’s roadmap and other AI accelerator architectures, the question is no longer about capacity alone—it’s about how deeply SK Hynix can lock in customers through design collaboration. The structural case for the stock remains as strong as the custom HBM silicon it plans to deliver.