By Hyunjoo Jin
SEOUL, July 10 (Reuters) - When South Korean billionaire Chey Tae-won rang the Nasdaq's opening bell for SK Hynix's $26.5 billion listing on Friday, it marked the ultimate payoff of a bet many once considered risky: buying a loss-making chipmaker that has since become an AI powerhouse.
SK Group's 2012 acquisition of Hynix was viewed as problematic even within the business conglomerate: Memory chips are cyclical and capital-intensive, and the company was losing money while trailing Samsung Electronics in market share and technology.
But under Chey, seeking an edge over Samsung, SK Hynix has spent more than a decade betting on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, at the time a niche technology. The wager paid off as HBM became a critical component in Nvidia's AI accelerators, helping SK Hynix emerge as the world's biggest producer of the chip.
"This is a truly historical moment. We've been waiting for a long, long time," he said during an interview with CNBC on Friday. "It is a kind of dream and now it is a dream come true," he said.
SEOUL, July 10 (Reuters) - When South Korean billionaire Chey Tae-won rang the Nasdaq's opening bell for SK Hynix's $26.5 billion listing on Friday, it marked the ultimate payoff of a bet many once considered risky: buying a loss-making chipmaker that has since become an AI powerhouse.
SK Group's 2012 acquisition of Hynix was viewed as problematic even within the business conglomerate: Memory chips are cyclical and capital-intensive, and the company was losing money while trailing Samsung Electronics in market share and technology.
But under Chey, seeking an edge over Samsung, SK Hynix has spent more than a decade betting on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, at the time a niche technology. The wager paid off as HBM became a critical component in Nvidia's AI accelerators, helping SK Hynix emerge as the world's biggest producer of the chip.
"This is a truly historical moment. We've been waiting for a long, long time," he said during an interview with CNBC on Friday. "It is a kind of dream and now it is a dream come true," he said.
24 days ago
