SK Hynix is a South Korean semiconductor company and the world's second-largest memory chipmaker, a leading supplier of HBM (high-bandwidth memory) for AI GPUs including Nvidia's accelerators.
TSMC is the world's largest dedicated semiconductor foundry, manufacturing advanced chips for fabless companies like Apple, Nvidia, and AMD.
The Verdict: SK Hynix vs TSMC
TSMC and SK Hynix sit in different parts of the same AI chip boom. TSMC, founded in 1987 in Hsinchu, Taiwan by Morris Chang, is the world's largest dedicated semiconductor foundry — it manufactures the advanced logic chips that Nvidia, Apple, and AMD design, and posted a market cap of roughly $2.224T with FY2025 revenue of about $122.9B (+31.6% year over year), per TSMC's own reporting. SK Hynix, founded in 1983 as Hyundai Electronics and renamed after SK Group's 2012 acquisition, makes memory rather than logic — DRAM, NAND, and the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that feeds Nvidia's AI GPUs — and carried a market cap near $868.5B with FY2025 revenue of about $68.1B, up roughly 47% year over year as HBM/AI memory demand pushed its operating profit past Samsung Electronics' for the first time.
By scale, TSMC is more than 2.5x SK Hynix on both market cap and revenue, reflecting its position as the single foundry nearly every major AI chip designer depends on. SK Hynix's smaller but faster-growing business shows just how central memory has become to the AI buildout — its HBM franchise is now a direct profit driver, not a commodity afterthought. Readers tracking who builds the chips should watch TSMC; readers tracking the AI memory supply crunch should watch SK Hynix.
Frequently asked questions
Is TSMC bigger than SK Hynix?
Yes, by a wide margin. TSMC's market cap of about $2.224T is roughly 2.5x SK Hynix's $868.5B, and TSMC's FY2025 revenue (~$122.9B) was also about 1.8x SK Hynix's (~$68.1B).
What's the difference between TSMC and SK Hynix?
TSMC is a foundry — it manufactures chips that other companies (Nvidia, Apple, AMD) design. SK Hynix is a memory maker, producing DRAM, NAND, and the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in AI accelerators. They're both essential to the AI chip supply chain but make fundamentally different products.
Why is SK Hynix's revenue growing so fast?
SK Hynix's FY2025 revenue rose about 47% year over year on surging demand for HBM, the memory used in AI GPUs, which also pushed its operating profit ahead of Samsung Electronics' for the first time.
Data from Value Add Pulse coverage and company research — see the full threads for SK Hynix and TSMC.