A company that was on the verge of bankruptcy has just surpassed Bitcoin in market value

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

On June 22, SK Hynix's stock price rose, bringing its market value to $1.35 trillion, surpassing Bitcoin's total market value of approximately $1.29 trillion, and at one point exceeding Samsung Electronics to become the highest-valued company in South Korea.

According to Coinglass data, SK Hynix has risen to 16th place in the global asset rankings, while Bitcoin has slipped to 18th place.

HBM and a 13-Year Bet

The core driver of SK Hynix's recent rise is HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). AI training and inference have extremely high memory bandwidth requirements, and SK Hynix is the primary HBM supplier for Nvidia, with a market share exceeding 60%.

Financial report data shows that SK Hynix's Q1 revenue was 52.58 trillion won, with an operating profit of 37.61 trillion won, achieving a profit margin of 72%. Analysts currently have a consensus on SK Hynix's Q2 operating profit of around 62 to 65 trillion won, with some brokerages raising optimistic forecasts to over 68 trillion won.

At the beginning of April this year, market expectations for Q2 were mostly still in the 50 trillion won range. However, as memory prices continued to remain strong, brokerages generally made significant upward revisions. Management stated in the earnings call that the structural memory shortage brought about by artificial intelligence will last for at least several years and plans to significantly increase capital expenditures to expand advanced production capacity.

It is reported that SK Hynix began betting on HBM technology in 2009, at a time when the market paid little attention to this complex technology with limited initial demand. From the first generation of HBM to HBM3E, this all-in bet has lasted nearly 13 years, only reaching its crowning moment with the emergence of ChatGPT.

Image Source: AI Generated

SK Hynix's journey to today cannot be separated from a key external assistance. After the burst of the internet bubble in 2001, Hynix fell into a debt crisis, and its stock price once dropped to junk status, even negotiating with Micron Technology for a sale that ultimately failed. For the next decade, the company was largely under the control of creditors.

In 2012, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won pushed through the acquisition of Hynix through its investment holding subsidiary SK Square for about $3 billion, despite opposition from the board, renaming it SK Hynix and injecting substantial R&D funds. This investment allowed the company to continue advancing the HBM technology, which was still an unpopular track at the time. Currently, SK Square holds about 20% of SK Hynix's shares, making it its largest single shareholder.

It is worth mentioning that SK Square itself also attempted to enter the cryptocurrency market. In 2021, it acquired 35% of the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Korbit for about 90 billion won and planned to issue its own token, SK Coin. According to public reports, after the collapse of Terra/LUNA in 2022, the market cooled sharply, and the SK Coin issuance plan was subsequently shelved, with no substantial progress since.

According to Reuters citing informed sources, SK Hynix plans to go public on Nasdaq as early as this August, which will lower the trading threshold for U.S. institutions and passive funds, potentially attracting further capital inflow. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently stated that the collaboration between Nvidia and SK Hynix is expected to bring hundreds of billions of dollars in business opportunities to South Korea in the future.

Why is Capital Willing to Pay? The Crypto AI in the Mirror

In this wave of AI, the market is more willing to pay a premium for segments that have already generated actual orders and have visible supply bottlenecks. Computing power, memory, and electricity—assets that directly participate in the AI supply side—have received priority allocation because their revenues are quantifiable and their barriers are verifiable.

HBM production capacity is highly concentrated among SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron, with an expansion cycle lasting 2 to 3 years. This physical scarcity is not constructed through narrative; it is locked in by production cycles and technological barriers. The valuation logic of the storage industry is also shifting from "cyclical stocks" to "growth stocks."

SK Hynix's market value surpassing Bitcoin is a public statement from the capital market regarding two types of scarcity. With such high barriers formed on the physical level, the situation of Crypto AI deserves to be re-examined.

The Crypto AI sector has been telling a story for the past two years: decentralized computing power will reshape AI infrastructure, and open networks will surpass closed corporate data centers. The potential in this direction is real, but standing in front of the market value figures of SK Hynix today, several realities deserve attention.

The IC3 report released by 13 universities, including Cornell University, points out that the integration of Crypto and AI is still in its early stages, and the noise surrounding this intersection has overshadowed actual progress. Decentralized computing power, data markets, and governance mostly remain in the conceptual stage.

Specifically, taking Bittensor, the most representative project in the Crypto AI sector, as an example, its token TAO has dropped 20% in the past three months. Bittensor co-founder const stated on the X platform that the project's economic incentive layer is still dominated by the core team, who have chosen to maintain centralization at the cost of rapid iteration, and it is expected to take another year and a half to complete the core mechanism construction. In other words, their underlying mechanism is still under repair.

Cryptocurrency mining companies, closer to the hardware layer, are also facing difficulties. According to Galaxy Research data, Bitcoin miners are entering a "surrender phase," with the current network mining difficulty having decreased by over 20% from historical highs, marking the largest retracement since the crackdown on Bitcoin mining in China in 2021, with some miners continuously exiting the network or shutting down equipment.

In pursuit of transformation, mining companies such as Core Scientific, TeraWulf, and Hut 8 have announced their entry into the AI and high-performance computing fields. However, according to a VanEck report, this transformation faces a short-term funding gap of about $50 billion, with long-term capital needs of about $221 billion, and currently, the industry has only delivered about 25% of the leased AI capacity—companies that have missed construction milestones are facing downgrades from investors.

On the funding side, Arthur Hayes pointed out in a recent article titled "Reality Test" that since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, the AI industry has issued approximately $1.5 trillion in debt, roughly equivalent to the increase in the dollar M2 during the same period—AI has almost absorbed all new liquidity, leaving Bitcoin with no opportunity.

Hayes believes that this is not the logic of "when AI falls, funds will flow back to crypto." The upcoming large-scale IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI will further siphon market funds, and once the AI bubble bursts, bank credit contraction will simultaneously tighten liquidity, leading to Bitcoin being sold off along with AI.

Since the second half of last year, many traders who were originally active in the cryptocurrency market have begun to shift their attention to U.S. and Korean stocks, chasing AI hardware trends. The logic of capital flowing into AI infrastructure is also simple and straightforward: real orders, physical barriers, quantifiable profit margins.

This certainty is the fundamental reason why capital is willing to offer high premiums at present, while the AI narrative in the cryptocurrency market lacks precisely this certainty.

In other words, the dividends of AI infrastructure are currently more likely to be captured by entities with technological barriers and real supply capabilities. In this process, the cryptocurrency network needs to more clearly define its position in the value chain.