America is building chip factories. Samsung and Micron (MU) are struggling to find the workers.
A McKinsey and SEMI Foundation report projects a US chip worker shortfall of 127,000 to 157,000 by 2030. Only 3% of US graduates who take engineering jobs go into semiconductors. The short-term fix is Korean staff on temporary assignment.
SK Hynix (SKHY) is discussing US memory-chip production with Intel (INTC). Leasing its Ohio site is one option.
Reuters reports SK Hynix may lease part of Intel's Ohio plant or form a cloud-backed venture there. Two months ago it denied a report that it wanted to buy the site.
Korean students are lining up for Samsung and SK Hynix programs as applications to top medical schools fall
Seven large companies run 13 university departments whose graduates are hired by the sponsor, and they drew a record 8,994 applications this year. Semiconductor departments rose 19.4 percent while battery departments fell 36.2 percent.
Kioxia weighs $10 billion US ADR deal as SK Hynix (SKHY) stake comes into focus
Bloomberg reports Kioxia is weighing an ADR listing of at least $10 billion. The listing plan has been public since May, so the number is the new part, and the company's biggest holder is the NAND rival it competes against.
JPMorgan (JPM) has ended its lending to Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund
JPMorgan notified Situational Awareness it would end their lending relationship after the July losses, Reuters reports. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America remain active brokers.
Leopold Aschenbrenner is buying options again through a new broker, six weeks after a 67% portfolio drop
The Financial Times says Situational Awareness is working with Clear Street and rebuilding in AMD, Intel, SK Hynix, SanDisk and CoreWeave using customized flex options. CNBC's list is not the same one.
Samsung and SK Hynix memory inventories fall below 10 days, KB Securities says. Kospi rally nears 7,000.
Foreigners and institutions bought a net 5.2 trillion won on Monday while individuals sold 6.8 trillion. KB Securities' Kim Dong-won says memory inventory at Samsung and SK Hynix is under 10 days and the stocks trade at three times 2027 earnings.
Samsung and SK Hynix (SKHY) plan a memory expansion bigger than CXMT's entire projected capacity
A Bank of Korea report dated September 2 says Samsung's P4 and P5 fabs and SK Hynix's Yongin fab will add more than 600,000 wafers a month of memory capacity from 2028. China's CXMT is expected to reach 500,000 to 600,000 in total from the same year, and its shipments run far below its capacity. The bank still calls China a long-term threat.
South Korea's token securities rollout starts in February 2027. Listed-stock pilot remains undated.
Korea's Financial Services Commission published a three-phase roadmap on September 4. Phase one, from February 2027, covers institutional private funds, private bonds and unlisted shares. Listed stocks are limited to a Korea Exchange pilot, and phases two and three, including stablecoin settlement, have no dates.
The US stock market is worth more than the world's next 13 largest combined
The US market is worth about $75 trillion today, China's $16.8 trillion and South Korea's about $4.5 trillion. World Bank data shows how each got there since 2005, when China's listed companies were worth less than Korea's.
SK Hynix's (SKHY) HBM share falls to 50% as Samsung gains ground
Counterpoint Research's second-quarter numbers put SK Hynix at 50 percent of HBM revenue, down from 58 percent in the first quarter and 64 percent a year earlier. Samsung went from 15 percent to 33 percent over the same year, and most of its sales are still HBM3E, with HBM4 only starting to count in the second half.
Nvidia (NVDA) cut Rubin Ultra's memory in half because HBM had become 40% of a rack's cost, SemiAnalysis says
SemiAnalysis says memory had reached 41% of a Rubin Ultra rack's capital cost after this year's HBM and DRAM price hikes. Halving the HBM per GPU takes it to 28%, with the savings moving to scale-up networking. The firm calls it a supply-crunch symptom, not weak demand.
How to buy Korean stocks from the US with ADRs, brokers, and ETFs
The Korea Exchange lists nearly 2,900 companies and around 10 of them trade in the US as depositary receipts. Korea scrapped its 30-year foreign investor registration rule in December 2023, and Interactive Brokers and Schwab now reach Seoul directly. Here are the four routes in and what still blocks them.
Samsung and SK Hynix sold their memory years in advance. Buyers left out now pay up to 5 times the contract price.
A 36-gigabyte HBM3E chip sells for about $2,100 on the spot market, while long-term contract customers pay 500,000 to 700,000 won ($360 to $500 USD). Korea's HBM export price passed $70 for the first time in July.
Nvidia's (NVDA) $3.5 billion MediaTek deal turns the chips built to replace its GPUs into an ecosystem play
Nvidia is buying $3.5 billion of MediaTek convertible bonds as MediaTek joins NVLink Fusion to build custom XPUs. The bigger reveal is NVHBM, Nvidia's custom memory claiming 30% more bandwidth than HBM4E, with Amazon's Trainium4 first in line.
Growing up, nobody in my school knew what Korea was. Now it's the world's No. 3 AI power.
My classmates knew exactly two Asian countries. Stanford's AI Index 2026 now ranks South Korea third in the world in AI models, and the memory chips behind the whole AI trade come from Seoul.
China's top DRAM maker ChangXin (CXMT) lost money a year ago. It just earned $10.8 billion in six months
China's largest DRAM maker reported 150.31 billion yuan ($22.4 billion) in first-half revenue, up 873.6%, with profit 36% above its own IPO forecast.
SK Hynix (SKHY) breaks ground on $4 billion Indiana HBM plant as production slips to 2029
SK Hynix broke ground Thursday on its first US plant, an advanced packaging site for AI memory in West Lafayette, Indiana. The company now targets mass production in the second half of 2029. Its CHIPS Act award said 2028.
China's YMTC is raising $4.9 billion to chase Samsung and SK Hynix in NAND. It just passed Kioxia to become the world's third-largest producer
China's top NAND maker YMTC filed to raise about $4.9 billion and just passed Kioxia into third place in the market. The threat to Samsung and SK Hynix is real, but it sits in the cheaper part of the memory business.
Why Samsung can't match SK Hynix's massive buyback without forcing its insurers to sell
Samsung Life Insurance and Samsung Fire & Marine together own about 10% of Samsung Electronics' common stock, the exact ceiling set by a Korean banking law. That's the real reason Samsung's record payout leaned on dividends instead of the stock buyback and cancellation SK Hynix just did.
Three days after announcing its record payout, Samsung fell as much as 7.3% Monday morning.
Samsung Electronics fell as much as 7.3% in Seoul trading Monday, the first trading day after announcing a record 90 to 110 trillion won ($65.1B to $79.6B USD) payout. SK Hynix, which raised its own payout target the same week, held close to flat.
SK Hynix stock costs $1,248 a share in Korea. Will it follow Samsung with a split?
SK Hynix (SKHY) shares closed at 1.73 million won ($1,248) on Friday. Chairman Chey Tae-won says he would consider a split if enough people ask, though the company's own CEO has downplayed the idea.
Korean investors poured $85.6M into Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) in one week. The fund already holds Samsung and SK Hynix.
Korean retail investors bought $85.61 million of the Roundhill Memory ETF in a single week, their second-biggest US purchase after Alphabet. The fund is 26.19% Samsung Electronics and 21.61% SK Hynix, two stocks they can buy at home in won.
A Korean investor cashed out a savings account for chip stocks in July and lost close to half. Their parents' retirement money went into the same funds.
A 35-year-old cashed out a 100 million won savings account for Korean chip stocks in early July and has about 60 million won left. That was savings, not borrowed money. Korean household credit passed 2,000 trillion won for the first time, with loans outside mortgages growing faster than home loans.