Samsung Electronics crossed $1 trillion in total stock market value on May 6 after its shares rallied 14% on surging orders from AI data centres, making it only the second Asian company after Taiwan's TSMC to reach that level. Micron, the US memory chipmaker, followed on May 26 when its shares surged 19% after Swiss investment bank UBS raised its price target on the stock from $535 to $1,625, the highest target among all 46 analysts covering the company.
Today, May 27, South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix rose 11% and crossed $1 trillion in total stock market value for the first time, making South Korea the only country outside the United States with two companies simultaneously at that level.
All three crossed the milestone within 21 days of each other, and all three manufacture the same product: High-Bandwidth Memory chips, specialised chips that sit directly on top of Nvidia's AI processors inside data centres and give them the speed to process AI workloads. Samsung and SK Hynix together control approximately 80% of the global market for those chips, with Micron as the only other manufacturer at a commercial scale, according to market research firm IndexBox.
Peter Kim, global investment strategist at KB Securities, told CNBC's Squawk Box Asia this morning that "the fundamentals and valuations of the two twin towers are still very much intact," referring to SK Hynix and Samsung.
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Orders from AI data centres have grown faster than any of the three companies can fill them, and all three have sold out their entire chip production through 2026. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said in March that the global shortage is likely to persist until 2030 because building new manufacturing capacity takes four to five years minimum.
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