South Korea’s storage giant SK Hynix’s latest financial report is out—and it directly outdoes Nvidia.

SK Hynix’s revenue in the first quarter was $35.5 billion, and its net profit reached $25.4 billion. Its net profit margin has surged to 77%, comfortably above Nvidia.
Just how outrageous is this profit margin? Simply put: if you sell storage chips with a price tag of 100 yuan, the pure profit you take home is 77 yuan. Looking across all manufacturing industries worldwide—and even most industries—there’s almost no second company that can reach a profitability level like this.
So what does a 77% net profit margin mean? Put simply, when you sell storage chips for 100 yuan, what you take home as pure profit is 77 yuan. Across all manufacturing industries worldwide, and in most industries as well, it’s almost impossible to find another company that can achieve earnings at this level.
Now, tech companies around the world are building AI data centers, and they need a type of high-end memory called HBM. SK Hynix got into this space early and has done it the best—selling at premium prices, and others are even lining up to buy.
Just the price of memory chips alone has risen by 60% in a single quarter, while flash memory is up 70%.
Ordinary memory used in phones and computers isn’t as easy to sell, but the chips demanded by AI servers are selling like crazy—making up for all the money earned less in other areas.
There’s also one more thing: supply can’t keep up with demand.