SKHX Round-Trips Its AI-Trade Unwind as Nvidia Doubles Down on SK Hynix Memory

Round-Tripping the AI-Trade Unwind

SKHX is up 11.11% over the last 24 hours to $1,498, with roughly $118.2M in volume crossing the Hyperliquid perp. This isn't a single fresh headline so much as a continuation: SK Hynix got caught in an AI-trade unwind earlier this week that cut the stock about 11%, and this leg essentially round-trips that drawdown. The perp tracks one share of SK hynix common stock with the underlying KRW price converted to USD, so the print also carries a USD/KRW component on top of the Seoul tape.

The backdrop is why dip-buyers showed up so fast. SK Hynix has been the cleanest large-cap expression of the memory cycle, up roughly 240% this year with its market cap crossing $1 trillion in May — only the third Asian company after TSMC and Samsung to hit that mark. With HBM still sold out and pricing climbing, a 11% wobble reads as positioning noise rather than a thesis break, and the bounce confirms the market still treats SK Hynix as a buy-the-dip name inside the AI-memory trade.

Nvidia Doubles Down on SK Hynix Memory

The structural anchor under this snapback is Nvidia. On his June 7 Seoul trip, Jensen Huang met SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung and flagged a prolonged chip shortage, calling SK Hynix Nvidia's "largest memory partner" and saying the billions it already spends there each year will "grow substantially." That's not a vague handshake — Huang confirmed Nvidia's newly launched Vera CPU will use SK Hynix [DRAM](/movers/dram), and the two sides signed a multi-year cooperation pact spanning AI supercomputers, robotics, digital twins, and semiconductor manufacturing.

The supply math is what makes this matter. SK Hynix commands roughly 54% of the global HBM market and is estimated to hold the majority of Nvidia's Vera Rubin HBM4 volume, and its record first-quarter profit was driven by exactly this AI memory shortage. When the dominant HBM supplier and the dominant accelerator vendor publicly lock arms for a "massive-scale" 2H 2026 buildout, the read-through is share-take and pricing power, not just a sector bid.

Two Catalysts Still Loaded

There are two specific events keeping this name bid that haven't fully played out. First, the listing: SK Hynix is targeting a US ADR offering as soon as August that could raise around $14 billion, after filing confidentially with the SEC back in March. Reporting points to SEC clearance landing the week of June 22 — a hard date that puts a US-investor liquidity event directly in play and gives the stock a near-term event to trade around.

Second, the capacity roadmap. In an exclusive interview, Chey told Nikkei the company will triple wafer capacity by 2034 — doubling within five years first — with four fabs under construction in Yongin and the first due online in early 2027. Crucially, Chey framed even that as possibly not enough, and floated overseas expansion if Korea can't supply the power, water, and labor. For a perp trader, the setup is clean: an event-driven catalyst on June 22, a multi-year supply story that reframes the cycle as longer than feared, and a tight memory market underneath. The risk is the obvious one — this is a crowded, high-beta AI-memory long, and the same positioning that unwound 11% this week can do it again.