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SK Hynix, the South Korean memory chip giant, now pulls roughly 65% of its revenue from the United States. That’s not because Americans suddenly developed an insatiable appetite for RAM sticks. It’s because the AI infrastructure buildout is overwhelmingly concentrated in the US, and SK Hynix makes the memory chips that power it.
The company posted 97.1 trillion won, approximately $64.1 billion, in revenue for 2025. Net income came in at 42.9 trillion won, or about $28.3 billion. And the engine behind all of it is high-bandwidth memory, the specialized chips that AI accelerators like Nvidia’s GPUs need to function.
The HBM monopoly powering the AI revolution
SK Hynix commands somewhere between 50% and 64% of the global HBM market, depending on which quarter you’re looking at. In Q2 2025, the company held roughly 62% of HBM shipments. By Q3, its revenue share sat at 57%.
The demand is so intense that SK Hynix’s HBM production is reportedly sold out well into 2026. Nvidia is among the primary customers. Next-generation HBM3E and HBM4 chips are in the pipeline, designed to handle the increasingly absurd computational demands of frontier AI models.
A Nasdaq debut for the record books
SK Hynix debuted on the Nasdaq in July 2026, raising $26.5 billion in the process. That made it the largest US listing by a foreign company and the second-largest overall share sale in US history, trailing only SpaceX.
South Korean chipmakers have historically traded at a discount compared to their American and Taiwanese peers. By listing on Nasdaq, SK Hynix is positioning itself to be valued as the global AI infrastructure play it actually is, not like a regional memory manufacturer.
What this means for crypto and tech investors
SK Hynix’s revenue concentration tells a clear story: the current wave of HBM demand is being driven almost entirely by AI workloads, not crypto mining or blockchain applications. None of the major crypto-focused publications covered this revenue breakdown, indicating the connection simply isn’t there right now.
SK Hynix’s HBM chips being sold out through 2026 suggests that hyperscalers, including Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon, are not pulling back on AI infrastructure spending. Samsung has struggled with yield issues on its own HBM products, and Micron, while making progress, remains a distant third in market share.
The risk is concentration. When 65% of revenue comes from one country and the bulk of demand comes from one application, any disruption, whether through trade policy, export controls, or a sudden cooling in AI investment, would hit disproportionately hard. SK Hynix operates fabs in South Korea and China, adding another layer of geopolitical complexity.
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