SKHX Erases Its Weekend Discount as the NVIDIA Pact Floors a Brutal SK Hynix Reopen

Up Perp, Down Stock

The signal in SKHX today is not the 7.80% gain — it's that the perp is rising while the underlying equity is falling. SKHX went into the weekend pricing a deep discount to SK Hynix, an explicit dollar-trader bet that Korea's cash market would gap lower again on Monday's reopen. It did exactly that, and the perp still went up.

Run the basis. SK Hynix common closed Friday near ₩2.07 million, and when Seoul reopened Monday the stock opened down roughly 10%, tripping another KOSPI circuit breaker before recovering through the morning to about -4.06% at ₩1,986,000. With the won near 1,560 per dollar, that cash-close-times-FX mark on this single KRW-denominated share lands around $1,273-1,290.

So SKHX, up from roughly $1,212 23 hours ago to $1,307, has done more than close its weekend discount — it has erased it entirely and now prints at fair value or a slight premium. The perp wasn't tracking a rally in the stock. It was converging up to an underlying that gapped down less violently than the discount had priced.

The NVIDIA Floor

The reason SK Hynix bounced from -10% to -4% instead of extending Friday's memory flush arrived over the weekend: NVIDIA and SK hynix announced a multi-year technology partnership to co-develop next-generation memory for AI factories. Per SK hynix's own newsroom, the company will supply memory aligned with NVIDIA's roadmap across Vera Rubin AI supercomputers, Vera CPUs, [RTX](/movers/rtx) Spark PCs and Jetson Thor robotics, apply NVIDIA's CUDA-X and PhysicsNeMo tooling to chip design and computational lithography, and build autonomous-fab digital twins on Omniverse and cuOpt.

Worth being precise about what this is and isn't. There are no quantified volume or dollar commitments in the release — it's strategic co-engineering positioning, not a supply contract with a number attached. That's why it floored the stock rather than launching it: enough to give the marginal AI buyer a reason to step back in at the lows, not enough to override a macro tape that opened with strong U.S. payrolls reviving Fed-hike fears, the 10-year yield back above 4.5%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index down 10.26% in the same window. Jensen Huang's framing — SK hynix as "an extraordinary partner... playing a central role in delivering advanced memory" — is the bull case the perp had been leaning on all weekend, now made concrete.

The Basis Cushion Is Gone

With the discount closed, SKHX loses the asymmetry that made it interesting since Friday's Broadcom-triggered selloff. From here the perp tracks the underlying roughly tick-for-tick and inherits the cash market's full exposure: a KOSPI where Samsung and SK Hynix together are half the index, a won at 1,560 that adds an FX leg to every dollar print on this synthetic, and a macro backdrop that just punished leverage.

The forward swing factor is the confidentially filed U.S. ADR listing — reportedly up to $14 billion, targeted for the second half of 2026, with management citing "tremendously positive" investor feedback in early June. That cuts both ways: a genuine demand signal for the AI-memory story, but also fresh supply that lands while the stock is still digesting a 15%-plus drawdown off its early-June high. The perp no longer carries a discount to absorb the next shock; whatever Korea does on the next print, SKHX wears it at par.