21 Comments SK Hynix wants to tell a new story of AI valuation

21 Comments SK Hynix wants to tell a new story of AI valuation.

Recently, SK Hynix, a major Korean memory chip manufacturer, officially listed on Nasdaq in the United States. With its leading position in the high-bandwidth (HBM) market required for artificial intelligence, SK Hynix performed well on its first day of listing, with its stock price soaring 13.3% that day.

At the same time, SK Hynix CEO Guo Luzheng warned that the global storage industry will face the most serious supply shortage in history in 2027. Guo Luzheng said: "We predict that next year will be the worst year in the history of the industry from a supply perspective. Even after 2030, customer demand will still be higher than our supply capacity.

But we are doing our best to solve this problem." The direct reason for SK Hynix to be listed in the United States is very simple, which is to obtain larger and more direct dividends from AI infrastructure construction. For a long time, there has been a "Korea Discount" phenomenon that is difficult to break in the Korean domestic capital market (KOSPI).

Although SK Hynix has taken the lead in HBM, the crown jewel of AI chips, and even monopolized Nvidia's orders for a time, its valuation premium has always been difficult to fully unleash in the Korean market.

As the absolute highland of global technology capital, Nasdaq not only has the most abundant liquidity, but also gathers the world's most enthusiastic funds that are most willing to pay for AI imagination.

By listing in the United States, SK Hynix can directly access this huge capital reservoir and maximize its "technological dividend" into "valuation dividend".

But for this capital dividend to continue sustainably and healthily, the premise is that the competition in AI infrastructure cannot stop, and the demand for AI must continue to explode, and this is exactly where the biggest anxiety in the entire technology world lies.

On July 13, SK Hynix shares in the South Korean stock market closed down 15.4%, setting a record for the largest decline. In this vigorous AI wave, if NVIDIA is the "shovel seller", then SK Hynix plays the role of "the water seller".

As long as the giants are still crazily piling up computing power to prove that they are not left behind in the AI era, SK Hynix’s business will continue. Because of this, Guo Luzheng's warning about "the most serious supply shortage in 2027" sounds more like a charge in the capital market, implying the certainty of orders and firm prices.

However, this grand narrative based on the supply-side perspective seems a bit too optimistic in the face of the cruel laws of the traditional semiconductor cycle. Throughout the history of memory chip development, this is a typical industry with high capital expenditure, high volatility, and heavy cycles.

There is often a thin line between "supply exceeds demand" and "overcapacity". The production capacity that manufacturers are expanding today to meet the current "frenetic" demand is very likely to become the excess capacity that will crush prices when the industry is at a trough tomorrow.

This brings us to the core of the problem: whether memory chips are really in short supply, the decision-making power essentially does not lie in SK Hynix’s subjective will, nor in the production capacity blueprint outlined by its CEO, but in whether terminal AI technology can be implemented and become a true productivity revolution.

Currently, the entire AI industry is at a subtle critical point.

Wall Street's patience is being exhausted, and investors are beginning to make a simple calculation: Technology giants have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on AI hardware, but apart from large-model APIs and subscription fees, how much substantial efficiency improvements and business returns has AI brought to traditional industries?

If AI applications cannot be implemented on a large scale in real-world scenarios such as medical care, finance, manufacturing, and consumption, and if AI companies are still unable to find business models that can close the loop, then the commercial closed loop of downstream cloud giants will break.

Once capital expenditures become unsustainable, the phantom network of computing power intertwined by GPU and HBM will face revaluation just like the Internet bubble in the United States in the past. The demand for memory chips does not arise out of thin air. It is a derived demand from the demand for AI computing power.

When NVIDIA's GPUs are no longer snapped up, SK Hynix's HBM will go from "hot commodity" to "inventory pressure" overnight. Once downstream demand cools down, the "worst shortage in history" narrative that SK hynix has worked so hard to manage will also collapse.

Of course, judging from this moment, SK Hynix’s listing in the United States is undoubtedly a move with business wisdom. It successfully tied itself to the most active capital in the world at the most dazzling moment of the AI bubble. But the capital market has always been a magnifying glass.

The foundation of the "golden era in which customer demand is still higher than supply capacity in 2030" imagined by Guo Luzheng is not built in SK Hynix's own production lines, but in thousands of application scenarios that are trying to transform AI into real productivity.

The future direction of this new capital market story about AI will ultimately depend on ordinary developers and enterprise users in all walks of life who are trying to use AI as a lever to leverage future productivity miracles. (

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