A Company Once on the Brink of Bankruptcy Just Surpassed Bitcoin in Market Cap
On June 22nd, driven by rising stock prices, SK Hynix’s market capitalization reached $1.35 trillion, surpassing Bitcoin's total market cap of approximately $1.29 trillion. This temporarily made it South Korea's highest-valued company.
The core driver of this surge is HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), for which SK Hynix is the primary supplier to NVIDIA, holding over 60% market share. AI's demand for high memory bandwidth has translated into immense profitability, with SK Hynix reporting a 72% operating profit margin in Q1.
The company's success follows a 13-year bet on HBM technology, beginning in 2009. It nearly failed after the 2001 dot-com bubble, was acquired by SK Group in 2012, and was subsequently recapitalized to continue its long-term HBM development.
The article contrasts this with the Crypto AI narrative. Capital currently favors AI infrastructure players like SK Hynix due to "real orders, physical barriers, and quantifiable profit margins." In comparison, Crypto AI projects, promising decentralized compute and data markets, remain largely conceptual with limited tangible progress. Examples include Bittensor, whose core mechanisms are still under development, and Bitcoin miners transitioning to AI, who face significant funding gaps and execution challenges.
The piece cites analysis suggesting the AI sector has absorbed nearly all new market liquidity since 2022, leaving little for crypto. It concludes that the current AI infrastructure红利 is captured by entities with proven technical barriers and supply capabilities, while crypto networks still need to define their concrete role in the value chain.
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