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The Projection

The surface is never the system.

News · last 7 days

Summary

SK Hynix posted a record Q2 on July 28 but still missed consensus, and its stock fell as Korea's whole market broke lower.

Whether SK Hynix's guided second-half HBM4 full ramp holds on schedule, and whether Nvidia's Vera Rubin volume commitments stay firm, would settle if this miss was a blip.

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SK Hynix

What SK Hynix is up to now

New 09-04: deferred again, on its own clock. A Form 6-K filed with the SEC says "no matters have been determined" on a rumored 5-10 trillion won ($3.6-7.2bn) pre-IPO capital raise for Solidigm, its US NAND subsidiary — the second such non-answer, after an 08-06 6-K that denied a decision and promised an update within a month. Today met that deadline by pushing the disclosure commitment out to 2026-12-04. The raise traces to an 08-05 Korea Economic Daily report. Read as: a memory maker keeping a capital-markets option open through the squeeze without committing to it, and disclosing on a schedule of its own choosing rather than on events. Note this is the NAND arm, not the HBM/DRAM business the shortage thread turns on. New 08-23: showed i-HBM packaging at Hot Chips 2026 (claimed >30% lower thermal resistance) and — the newsworthier half — disclosed it is EVALUATING INTEL'S EMIB packaging alongside TSMC's CoWoS for future HBM-logic integration. That points at a possible SK hynix-Intel packaging tie-up in a market CoWoS currently defines, and is the first concrete sign of a second source for advanced packaging. New 08-16: no further movement — no SK Hynix-specific coverage today; the 08-13 price-pop and Q2-print picture below carries unchanged through the week's close. Board-pass note on the unrolled Q2 axes figure still stands. week 2026-08-10 (/week): No new structural development this week — the only movement was a +8% intraday price pop (08-13, alongside Micron +6%, SanDisk +15%) explicitly read as CoreWeave's earnings validating the memory-demand "monetization phase" story, flagged in-digest as price action only. The standing structural picture (recorded 08-07 — ~55% HBM share, first through Nvidia's HBM4 qualification, an all-time-record but consensus-missing Q2 operating profit of ₩60.5426T/+557% YoY that still triggered a -9.61% close and a second KOSPI circuit breaker, the AMEC equipment-testing hedge, the early-stage Chongqing packaging-plant stake-sale talks) is unchanged across the full 08-10→08-15 window. Board-pass note: that Q2 print post-dates the board's 07-25 axes derivation and hasn't been rolled into `axes_num` — a real gap, flagged for the next axes refresh rather than corrected here. New 08-13: SK Hynix ran +8% intraday (alongside Micron +6%, SanDisk +15%) as CoreWeave's earnings read as the 'monetization phase' validation Wall Street wanted for the memory-demand story — flagged in- digest explicitly as price action only, no new structural development against the standing picture. That standing picture (recorded 08-07) holds: ~55% HBM share, first through Nvidia's HBM4 qualification, the Q2 print that was an all-time-record operating profit (₩60.5426T, +557% YoY) that still missed consensus and got punished with a -9.61% close and a second KOSPI circuit breaker, the AMEC equipment-testing hedge, and the early-stage Chongqing packaging-plant stake-sale talks.

as of 2026-09-04

Pocket Chips

The metrics — click any for its citations + threads

Posture med
expanding 1 src →
Capital · available high
~$28-29B readily-liquid (cash 21.17T KRW + ST inv 18.25T KRW = 39.42T KRW / ~1,380); net cash ~$12.7B (total debt 21.83T KRW ~$15.8B). NB board.yaml cites ~$39B cash+STI, higher — likely … 2 src →
Capital · operating high
~$30B/yr FCF (TTM 41.79T KRW / ~1,380); TTM operating cash flow ~$51B (70.68T KRW); FY2025 FCF ~$18.7B (25.85T KRW) 1 src →
Capital · deployed high
~$21B/yr capex (TTM 28.89T KRW ~$20.9B) — HBM/DRAM capacity (M15X, Yongin); FY2025 capex 27.52T KRW ~$19.9B 1 src →
Capital · in high
FY2025 revenue ~$70B (97.15T KRW); TTM revenue ~$96B (132.08T KRW, HBM surge); TTM net income ~$54B (75.14T KRW) 1 src →
Capital · out high
capex ~$21B/yr dominates; dividends modest (not separately fetched — low confidence on the dividend line) 1 src →
Optionality med
mixed — strong FCF but capex-cyclical and HBM-capacity-committed; SK chaebol control (SK Square / SK group) 1 src →
Gravity med
~$70-96B/yr GROSS direct revenue — supplies the HBM the whole AI buildout needs (Nvidia primary), ~29% of DRAM revenue; gated AI-infra far larger 1 src →

This week — what changed

Projects & threads

· Memory Squeeze scarcity — developing · last seen 2026-09-04 · 24 entries
· ASML — the EUV Monopoly buildout race — open · last seen 2026-08-25 · 3 entries

Full item history for SK Hynix →

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