Micron Technology and SK Hynix joined the trillion-dollar club inside 24 hours, expanding the cohort of American and Asian semiconductor companies riding the artificial-intelligence buildout to a fifth and a sixth member and pulling exchanges in Taipei and Seoul to fresh records.
Micron shares jumped 19 percent Tuesday in New York, lifting the Boise memory maker's market value above $1 trillion for the first time, after UBS tripled its price target on the stock from $535 to $1,625 a share. SK Hynix climbed as much as 11 percent in Seoul on Wednesday and closed up 9.21 percent, pushing the South Korean rival across the same threshold. Both companies make the high-bandwidth memory that sits next to the graphics processors powering large AI models, a niche that has shifted in 18 months from commodity cyclical to chronic shortage.
What shifted
UBS analysts told clients the re-rating still has room to run. "We believe the market will start to put a more 'normal' multiple on the stock and MU will continue to re-rate higher as more details emerge about the structural changes AI has driven to the entire memory complex," the firm wrote, according to CNBC. The new target implies Micron shares could more than double from Friday's close. The stock has more than tripled year to date and surpassed a $700 billion market value only a few weeks ago.
The Korean leg of the trade is older and steeper. SK Hynix shares are up about 250 percent since the start of the year, helped by the company's position as a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory to Nvidia. Samsung Electronics, which crossed $1 trillion earlier this month, closed 2.68 percent higher Wednesday. The two firms now account for more than 40 percent of South Korea's Kospi benchmark, which has nearly doubled in 2026 according to LSEG data.
Huang in Taipei
The same morning SK Hynix breached $1 trillion, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang told an audience in Taipei that the company will lift its annual outlay in Taiwan to $150 billion, from a current run rate of roughly $100 billion. "Now we're spending $100 [billion], going to $150 billion in Taiwan each year," Huang said, noting that the figure was $10 billion to $15 billion just four or five years ago.
Nvidia will break ground by year-end on a new Taipei office complex called Constellation, which is designed to house 4,000 employees and open in 2030, four times the company's existing headcount on the island. The new annual figure would exceed Nvidia's most recent quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion and dwarf the $125 billion implied by the company's separately announced four-year, $500 billion U.S. AI infrastructure plan.
Taiwan's Taiex index rose 1.7 percent to a record close. TSMC, which manufactures Nvidia's chips and is expected to count the company as its largest customer this year, closed 1.3 percent higher. MediaTek gained 8.8 percent and Delta Electronics rose 7.2 percent. "Taiwan is the epicenter of the AI revolution," Huang said.
On the Street
The rally is no longer confined to a handful of names. Intel, which missed the early AI move, is up more than sixfold from its lows and trading near all-time highs after last summer's federal investment. Qualcomm, Advanced Micro Devices and Marvell Technology have all set records. Marvell is up more than 130 percent year to date and more than 220 percent over the past 52 weeks, with a forward price-to-earnings multiple of roughly 45, a 10-year high for the stock.
Peter Kim, global investment strategist at KB Financial Group, argued the Korean memory pair still has support from forecasts. "Fundamentals and valuations of the two twin towers … are still very much intact," Kim said, adding that SK Hynix had become "cheaper" on a multiple basis because analysts were raising earnings estimates faster than share prices were rising.
The counterparty
The wires carrying Tuesday's and Wednesday's reporting all leaned center, and none of the desks publishing on the rally paired it with a sustained bearish case. No prominent sell-side skeptic was quoted on the tape by press time. The clearest internal caution came from analysts cited by CNBC who warned that the concentration of two trillion-dollar chipmakers inside the Kospi leaves the index more exposed to a slowdown in global data center capital spending and to supply-chain disruption.
Mainland Chinese suppliers offered a visible counter-tape. Shares of SMIC slid Wednesday, Cambricon fell 5 percent and Hygon dropped 7 percent, giving back gains made earlier in the week after Huawei unveiled its "LogicFolding" chip-design method on Monday. Nvidia's first-quarter revenue from mainland China and Hong Kong roughly halved year-over-year, even as Taiwan revenue rose more than 50 percent.
Marvell reported after Tuesday's close; heading in, the options market priced a roughly 13.5 percent move by week's end against an eight-quarter average swing near 11.75 percent, a test of whether the broader AI complex can absorb a single disappointment without breaking the trend that pulled two more chipmakers to $1 trillion this week.