For years, South Korea has quietly been the world's memory chip powerhouse. By 2022, the country owned over 60% of the global memory market—an astonishing 70% of DRAM and 52% of NAND flash. That dominance kept Korea in the #2 spot in the entire semiconductor industry for a decade straight.
But then came the AI boom, and with it, a new star: High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Think of HBM as the "turbocharger” for AI—without it, today's giant language models would crawl instead of sprint. And who's leading this revolution? SK Hynix, a Korean chipmaker that now commands about half of the global HBM market. Their latest HBM3 and HBM3E chips are so advanced that they've become the preferred fuel for NVIDIA's Hopper and Blackwell GPUs, the very engines behind ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and countless AI breakthroughs.
The numbers are jaw-dropping: the HBM market is projected to grow 30% every year, ballooning from $17 billion in 2024 to nearly $100 billion by 2030. For SK Hynix, HBM has already become its crown jewel, accounting for a quarter of its revenue in 2025.
So the next time you marvel at how fast AI can write, translate, or even generate medical insights, remember this: behind every powerful GPU brain, there's a Korean memory chip making it possible.