SK Hynix's stock has surged 67% in 2023 due to its Nvidia deal, while rival Samsung's stock is up 24%, on track to underperform SK Hynix by the most in a decade
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2023 share-price divergence was an early market signal that investors saw SK Hynix’s Nvidia relationship as more consequential than Samsung’s broader memory exposure. That view was reinforced when SK Hynix finished 2023 in second place by Korean market capitalization after an 89% rise in its market value.
The arc later moved from valuation to operating leadership: SK Hynix overtook Samsung in quarterly memory revenue in 2025. Subsequent reporting on Nvidia’s HBM4 allocations suggests the customer relationship remained central to that shift.
First-order effects
- SK Hynix receives an immediate valuation premium from its Nvidia deal, while Samsung’s 24% gain leaves it markedly behind on relative share performance.
- The widening gap makes SK Hynix’s Nvidia-linked memory position a more prominent driver of investor expectations than Samsung’s memory business in this period.
Second-order effects
- Samsung faces greater pressure to show that it can convert its scale into comparable participation in Nvidia-linked, high-value memory demand.
- Memory suppliers’ valuations become more sensitive to exposure to leading AI-chip customers, rather than moving in lockstep with the broader memory cycle.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern persists, the memory market may be valued less as a single commodity market and more as distinct segments whose economics depend on qualification with AI-system leaders.
- A concentrated set of AI-chip customers could increasingly influence which memory makers capture profits and investment capacity, as later HBM allocation reporting indicates.
The trend: AI infrastructure is shifting memory-industry value toward suppliers with proven positions in high-performance, customer-qualified products.