Via tomshardware.com
The South Korean chipmaker's Q2 2026 results reveal how AI infrastructure spending is minting extraordinary profits in the HBM market
Operating margins above 70% are the kind of numbers that make investors do a double-take. SK Hynix just reported a 76% operating margin for Q2 2026, up from 41% a year earlier, on the back of an AI-driven memory boom that is rewriting what profitability looks like in the semiconductor industry.
The company’s operating profit hit 60.54 trillion won, roughly $41.7 billion, a 557% year-over-year increase.
How a chip company prints 83% gross margins #
The short version: high-bandwidth memory. SK Hynix commands approximately 58% of the global HBM market, compared to Micron’s 21%. HBM is the specialized memory that sits directly on AI accelerator chips, and every major AI data center build-out needs it in quantity.
SK Hynix’s gross margin for the quarter came in at 83%, a figure more commonly associated with software businesses than factories that smelt silicon wafers.
The previous quarter, Q1 2026, was not exactly a slow warmup either. Revenue reached 52.58 trillion won, with an operating margin of 72% and operating profit of 37.61 trillion won.
Even with those numbers, SK Hynix slightly missed some analyst forecasts, which illustrates the strange position the company now occupies: a business growing at a pace that would have seemed implausible three years ago, still somehow falling short of elevated Wall Street expectations.
The AI memory boom has a competitive scoreboard #
Micron crossed the $1 trillion market cap threshold in May 2026, a milestone that preceded SK Hynix reaching a similar valuation earlier this year.
SanDisk, which focuses on NAND flash rather than DRAM, reported a gross margin of 78.4% in a recent quarter and has projected it will sustain margins above 80% through 2030.
SK Hynix pulled ahead specifically in HBM by being earlier and more aggressive in qualifying its chips with Nvidia and other AI chip designers. Micron, at roughly 21% HBM market share, is also the only major HBM supplier with significant US-based manufacturing, which gives it a geopolitical tailwind that neither SK Hynix nor Samsung can replicate.
What these margins mean for the memory cycle #
Unlike commodity DRAM or NAND, HBM requires far more complex manufacturing, uses advanced packaging techniques like chip stacking, and qualifies into specific AI chip designs over a long lead time. That qualification process creates switching costs and supply constraints that are structurally different from commodity memory markets.
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