By Daniel Tudor
Publication Date: 2026-02-11 01:53:00
For years the most typical career aspiration for a young Korean would have been to snag a job at Samsung. But a recent survey of young jobseekers showed the country has a new most sought-after employer: SK Hynix.
Lim Hee-jin, a student at the prestigious Seoul National University, calls SK Hynix “a really good company with high future potential. If a friend got hired there, I’d say ‘You got into a great place — I envy you’.”
The chipmaker is enjoying its most successful period thanks to dominance of one of the global economy’s most critical technologies — the high-bandwidth memory chips that are powering AI development.
SK Hynix has outmuscled better known chipmakers, including its great rival Samsung, to claim more than half of the global market for HBM chips, which allow the massive volumes of data required for AI to flow at high speeds. The company is the primary HBM supplier to Nvidia and was recently selected by Microsoft for its own proprietary AI chips.
Shortages of HBM as well as less powerful Dram and NAND memory are propelling prices higher, with SK Hynix reaping the benefit. Its fourth-quarter revenues were 66 per cent higher than a year earlier while its operating margins were 58 per cent, better than even TSMC, the world’s biggest chipmaker. SK Hynix’s market capitalisation is up 340 per cent over the past 12 months to Won640tn ($438bn).
Once “a follower”, SK Hynix was “now a shaper” of the chip sector, said Professor Kwon Seok-joon of…
