When South Korean billionaire Chey Tae-won rang the Nasdaq’s opening bell forSK Hynix’s $26.5 billion listingon yesterday, 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. “It is a kind of dream and now it is a dream come true,” he said.
“SK is our largest memory partner. Without SK’s partnership, today’s AI industry would not have developed as wonderfully as it has,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told reporters in Seoul in June, with the 65-year-old Chey standing beside him.
Kim Dae-il, a former SK Hynix board member and economics professor at Seoul National University, said Chey promoted executives from within Hynix rather than bringing in managers from the SK Group. He credited Park Sung-wook, a longtime chip engineer, who was appointed as CEO in 2013, with refusing to give up on HBM even amid scepticism among board members.
“There was enormous investment behind SK Hynix’s rise to that position. Ultimately, Chairman Chey’s achievement was making the right bets and putting the right people in place,” Kim said.
SK Hynix and SK Group did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
Chey’s prominence reflects a style that sets him apart from many South Korean tycoons, who typically avoid public attention.
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