Musk Calls Memory Pricing Extortionate as SK Hynix Maps Out Life After HBM

Elon Musk has branded current prices for DRAM and high-bandwidth memory "extortionate," a charge that lands squarely on South Korea's memory giants even though he never named them. Musk reserved his praise for US rival Micron, but press reports indicate his ire was aimed at SK Hynix and domestic peer Samsung. The flashpoint is a tight supply picture in DRAM and HBM, both of which are in heavy demand for modern data centres and AI workloads.

The broadside comes as SK Hynix tries to widen the conversation beyond bandwidth benchmarks. Chief Development Officer Ahn Hyun said Wednesday that leading the AI memory market will demand more than pushing HBM transfer speeds higher. He pointed to work underway on three-dimensional stacked DRAM, High Bandwidth Flash, shared memory systems and next-generation memory solutions.

Research inside the company hints at how far that ambition stretches. In tests of analog 3D FeNAND compute-in-memory, SK Hynix logged throughput 10 to 20 times higher than conventional 3D NAND, alongside energy efficiency improved by a factor of 4,000 to 5,000. Such designs are meant to tackle the surging power and compute demands of AI infrastructure.

MARS Debut Anchors a Broader Infrastructure Push

Those concepts took concrete form on Friday at the OCP Global Summit 2026, where SK Hynix unveiled a slate of memory and infrastructure technologies for artificial intelligence. Alongside MARS, a memory-centric rack-scale system, the chipmaker showed High Bandwidth Flash and a second-generation CXL-3.2 memory product with 256 gigabytes of capacity. The lineup reinforces its positioning for compute-heavy server applications.

Manufacturing decisions are moving in parallel. SK Hynix has applied for US export licences for its Dalian site in order to deploy additional equipment there, stressing that installation of Module B is being carried out in coordination with US authorities. No expansion of production capacity is being pursued at that location, the company made clear.

A Bruising Stretch for the Shares

Price pressure and competitive noise have combined to whipsaw the stock. Roughly a week ago, reports of development progress at Chinese rival CXMT stoked fears of future competition and triggered sector-wide selling; according to Reuters, SK Hynix fell more than ten percent in a single session on that news. Macro factors added to the strain, with Bloomberg reporting that SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics each lost more than 9 percent on Thursday as worries over Federal Reserve rate moves and AI financing hurdles weighed on semiconductors.

The shares finished Friday at 1,272,000.00 KRW, a modest gain of 0.8 percent on the day. Over seven days, however, the stock is down 24 percent — a slide that sits against a year-to-date advance of 96 percent.

Analysts Look Past the Wreckage

Market watchers remain constructive on earnings power. On 12 October, Meritz Securities kept its Buy rating and raised its price target to 3.2 million Won, projecting an operating profit of 80.1 trillion Won for the third quarter of 2026. Hard figures on how surging high-performance memory demand and margins are flowing through to the business will arrive shortly: SK Hynix has scheduled its official third-quarter earnings call for 28 October 2026 at 9:00 Seoul time.