“No customer’s demand has been fully met this year.”

Korean chip giant SK Hynix stated that the company’s overall inventory of DRAM and NAND is only about 4 weeks, at a historically low level. From cloud providers like Google and Microsoft to AI companies like OpenAI, and consumer electronics terminal manufacturers, all customers are unable to obtain sufficient supply.

Price increases are inevitable. Starting from the third quarter of 2025, SK Hynix raised HBM3E prices by 15%-20%, with the price of DDR5 16Gb chips surging by 102% in a single month. From November, all categories of DRAM saw price hikes, and NAND contract prices were also raised. In January 2026, prices increased sharply again by 20%-60%.

The rise in stock prices is also inevitable. Since the beginning of 2025, SK Hynix’s stock price has surged about sixfold, while another Korean chip giant, Samsung Electronics, has seen its stock price rise nearly fourfold.

As a result, the Korean stock market’s KOSPI index surpassed the 6,000-point milestone for the first time, with the total market capitalization of the Korean stock market exceeding $3.76 trillion, an increase of about $2.23 trillion since the beginning of 2025, surpassing the stock markets of Germany and France to historically rank among the top ten globally, rising to the ninth position. Since 2026, the index has accumulated a gain of nearly 45%, becoming one of the best-performing major stock markets globally.

South Korea, a small territory, whose stock market has long been undervalued and neglected by overseas funds, has now become the focus of the global capital market, also diverting the attention of the crypto-crazy young Koreans.

Repricing Samsung and SK Hynix

In the consumer electronics era, the industrial paradigm represented by Apple dominated for two decades.

As Apple’s largest contract manufacturer, Foxconn employs over 1.4 million workers in China, positioned at the bottom of the “smile curve.” Design, branding, and sales occupy the two ends of the curve, where profits rise. Profit distribution thus presents a stable structure: downstream (finished products/platforms) take the lion’s share, while upstream gets the scraps. After all, there are numerous upstream suppliers with strong substitutability; product definition power lies with brand manufacturers; demand is concentrated at the terminal; switching costs are low.

Many Chinese manufacturers take pride in being “Apple accessory manufacturers,” but from an investment perspective, the consensus is to buy Apple, not Foxconn.

But when four conditions converge—highly concentrated technology, slow capacity expansion, strong downstream dependence, and no short-term alternative paths—upstream transitions from “accessory suppliers” to “system bottlenecks.” Upstream instead gains pricing power.

This is precisely what is happening in the AI industry’s HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) sector.

Over the past decade, the semiconductor industry assumed a premise: the computing bottleneck lies in the computing chips themselves. But large model training shattered this perception. As parameter scales move from billions to trillions, GPUs face a more practical issue: no matter how fast they compute, data must be fed in. HBM determines whether GPUs can operate at full capacity; whether cluster efficiency is maximized; whether unit computing costs can be reduced. It has become the “vascular system” of AI chips.

The more advanced the GPU, the deeper its dependence on memory. Taking NVIDIA as an example, from A100 to H100, then to H200 and subsequent roadmaps, each generation of GPU’s bound HBM capacity and bandwidth increase stepwise. Computing power doubles, HBM usage almost doubles simultaneously. HBM cost’s proportion in the entire card’s BOM is rising.

And the players globally with true large-scale mass production capabilities are few: Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, (relatively smaller) Micron Technology. Apple needs Samsung, NVIDIA needs SK Hynix.

When demand grows exponentially while supply cannot be released quickly, price elasticity is amplified infinitely. In the traditional PC era, CPUs/GPUs took the bulk of profits, while memory had strong cycles and weak bargaining power. In the AI server era, HBM has become an irreplaceable component. When a component possesses both irreplaceability and supply constraints, it means absolute pricing power, almost inevitably gaining超额利润.

Repricing Samsung and SK Hynix has become the main theme in most financial markets, including South Korea. This theme’s allure even surpasses crypto.

Korean Retail Investors Dive into Semiconductors

If you opened Korean young people’s chat windows late at night in 2023 or 2024, Bitcoin was definitely a frequent topic. For a long time, South Korea has been one of the world’s most retail-driven cryptocurrency markets, playing a pivotal role.

And 2026 is the fourth year after LUNA’s collapse; the last figure that brought South Korea immense attention in the financial industry, Do Kwon, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison. This year of Bingwu Fire Horse is a strong fire year; the AI industry is still booming, and geographically fire-attributed South Korea clearly has excessive fire energy.

When our editor recently opened Naver’s investment forum, most posts were about “Samsung Electronics” and “SK Hynix.” Samsung and SK Hynix.

Korean investors once keen on highly volatile altcoins are now reallocating funds to domestic and foreign stocks, particularly those related to artificial intelligence and robotics.

According to Bloomberg statistics, trading volume on South Korean domestic cryptocurrency exchanges in January plummeted about 65% year-on-year. In stark contrast, trading volume on the KOSPI, South Korea’s core stock market benchmark, surged 221% during the same period. Securities firms’ margin balances have exceeded 30 trillion won (approximately $20.8 billion).

The speculative nature of Korean youth hasn’t changed, but they’ve shifted their battleground.

This sign emerged as early as the end of 2025.

In 2025, Upbit’s trading volume dropped 80% compared to the same period in 2024; activity in Bitcoin-KRW pairs was far lower than previous years. Instead, the Korean stock market was booming, with the KOSPI index surging over 70% within the year, continuously hitting historical highs. On Kakao Talk and Naver forums, retail investors who used to discuss altcoins daily are now talking about “AI semiconductor concept stocks.”

This migration also resonates subtly with the political atmosphere. Current President Lee Jae-myung prominently proposed the “KOSPI 5000” target during his campaign. It’s rumored that he repeatedly suffered losses in the stock market when young, and his experience of “being harvested like leeks” became motivation for pushing financial reforms.

Moreover, Lee Jae-myung clearly understands one thing: whether the stock market can reach 5000 ultimately depends on whether corporate profits can rise to a new level. And the Korean stock market’s weighting is highly concentrated in tech and semiconductor leaders, so he focused his bets on these industries.

After taking office, he quickly released strong capital market-friendly signals: establishing the “KOSPI 5000 Special Committee”; promoting amendments to the Commercial Act; strengthening shareholder rights equalization rules; enhancing board accountability. On his eighth day in office, he specifically visited the Korea Exchange. The goal is singular: to keep Korean residents’ money in the stock market long-term.

As for how high the Korean stock market can rise, some analysis also suggests that besides the impact of the AI sector, political circles may hope the upward trend continues until the local elections in June this year.

This atmosphere has deeply affected liquidity still in the crypto circle.

On February 11, 2026, Lighter exchange launched the world’s first on-chain perpetual contracts for Korean stocks, including Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, Hyundai Motor, and the KOSPI index, with leverage up to 10x. Days later, Trade XYZ listed Samsung and Hynix, also with tenfold leverage.

This is also a highly symbolic scene: trading platforms once hosting altcoin狂欢 now hosting Korean stocks.

After all, in this era where AI is reshaping the world, semiconductors are sexier than altcoins.