To The Moon

Jensen Huang is in Korea, and he’s been hyping stocks everywhere he goes: eating fried chicken with SK hynix executives, watching baseball, meeting esports players, and telling anyone who’ll listen, “business is booming” He also announced that SK hynix will become Nvidia’s primary memory supplier for AI data centers. One bullish headline after another.

$CSOP Samsung Electronics Daily (2x) Leveraged Product(07747)$ $SAMSUNG SEMICON(03132)$

So what exactly did Huang bring with him?

On this Korea trip, Huang effectively tied Nvidia’s next product cycle directly to Korean industry:

• Vera Rubin, Nvidia’s next-generation AI supercomputer, will require massive amounts of HBM and LPDDR.

• Vera CPU, a brand-new CPU platform, will also depend heavily on advanced memory.

• RTX Spark, which Huang called “the first new invention in the PC industry in 40 years.”

• Jetson Thor, Nvidia’s computing platform for robotics and autonomous driving.

“My friends — SK hynix, Samsung, LG, Hyundai, Naver — they’re all booming, and I’m happy their stock prices are so high.”

And this isn’t just talk. Nvidia announced that SK hynix will become its leading memory supplier for AI data centers, and that the two companies will jointly develop the memory used in the four product lines above. Huang added another bullish pitch on the side: the memory shortage is not over. From wafers to packaging to silicon photonics, the entire supply chain is still tight. Demand is simply too strong, and he says that will likely continue for years.

According to TrendForce, SK hynix held more than half of the global HBM market last year, and is still expected to hold around 50% this year. Many of those orders are coming from Nvidia. Year to date, SK hynix is up about 218%, Samsung about 174%, and the KOSPI has nearly doubled. At one point in early June before the selloff, SK hynix had risen roughly 100x over the prior year.

How crazy has Korea’s stock mania become?

Korea recently coined a new term: 벼락거지, or “thunderbolt poor.” It doesn’t mean someone went broke overnight. It means watching the people around you make a fortune in the stock market while you keep working honestly at your day job, and that gap hits like a bolt from the blue, turning disciplined workers into “poor people” in relative terms.

• Goldman Sachs says the number of Korean trading accounts has doubled over the past five years. As of February 2025, active accounts had surpassed 102 million, versus a total population of about 51.6 million, or nearly two accounts per person.

• About one-third of the population now trades stocks directly, nearly five times the pre-2020 level. In the first quarter of this year, new brokerage accounts opened by minors under 18 surged nearly 10x year over year.

• Leverage is rising fast: as of June 1, margin balances had reached 27.8 trillion won, about $18.3 billion, up 61.6% year to date.

• At a department store in Seoul’s Gangnam district, the employee restroom reportedly fills up around 3:30 p.m. every day, with workers hiding in stalls to watch the market and squeeze in one last trade before the close.

Under this kind of extreme FOMO, Koreans aren’t just running into the market. They’re sprinting.

Is SK hynix riskier than Samsung?

Both companies have posted record profits. Both have crossed the $1 trillion market cap threshold, making Korea the first country outside the U.S. to produce multiple trillion-dollar companies. But their business models are very different, and so is their resilience in an AI-driven cycle.

Samsung is a diversified giant spanning consumer electronics, foundry, and memory. First-quarter revenue came in at 133.9 trillion won. Memory is the main profit engine, with profit up more than 48x year over year and contributing more than 93% of operating profit, but memory still accounts for only about 56% of total group revenue. Smartphones, displays, and foundry help provide a more stable second growth curve. Samsung’s model is vertical integration: memory + foundry + logic.

SK hynix, by contrast, is a pure-play memory company. First-quarter revenue reached 52.58 trillion won, up 198%, while operating profit came in at 37.61 trillion won, up 405%. High-margin HBM pushed overall operating margin to 72%, far above Samsung’s roughly 43%. SK hynix is making an all-in bet on AI data centers, locking in Nvidia, Google, and Meta through long-term pricing agreements and prepayments, while maintaining very limited exposure to consumer demand.

Its upside is the strongest, but so is its fragility. If AI capex from core customers cools, if HBM demand weakens, or if Samsung catches up on thermal performance and yield, SK hynix’s earnings volatility will likely be much greater than Samsung’s. Blessings and risks come together. There is no absolute winner between the two models: Samsung relies on full-stack scale and balance-sheet resilience to ride out cycles, while SK hynix has achieved explosive profitability by securing the best seat in the AI gold rush.

So is this a bubble?

Jensen Huang has been bullish nonstop, one positive catalyst after another, yet the market still suffered a Black Monday-style selloff. Do you see this as a healthy correction, or the start of a bubble bursting?

In this AI memory supercycle, which would you rather own: SK hynix or Samsung?

Is this broad-based FOMO a sign we’re in the middle of the bull market, or a sign we’re near the top?