SK Hynix shares hit multidecade highs, Samsung also surges on OpenAI partnership (www.cnbc.com)

Shares of Samsung and SK Hynix jumped after OpenAI announced a partnership with the two South Korean chipmakers under its Stargate initiative to “increase the supply of advanced memory chips” and expand data center capacity in Korea. The market reacted strongly: Samsung hit its highest level since January 2021 (up ~4%) and SK Hynix surged over 9% to multidecade highs (its highest since 2000). The deal coincided with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman meeting South Korea’s president and top executives at both firms, signaling high-level national support for scaling AI infrastructure. Technically, the pact zeroes in on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) — the critical memory type used in AI accelerators. SK Hynix has already said it’s ready to mass-produce next‑generation HBM, and HBM4 is expected to be the main memory for Nvidia’s upcoming Rubin architecture; Samsung is reportedly seeking HBM4 certification from Nvidia. Scaling HBM supply and local data-center capacity could ease a key bottleneck for training and inference of next‑generation models, boost Korea’s strategic role in the AI hardware supply chain, and intensify competition among memory suppliers servicing major GPU makers like Nvidia.