SK Hynix has become the dominant supplier of these chips, a position that this month made it South Korea’s most valuable listed company, overtaking Samsung for the first time in 25 years. The two companies together supply most of the world’s HBMs and have supply agreements with Nvidia and OpenAI.
Such spending poses a hurdle for crypto, as this is the same capital cycle that has been competing with digital assets for investors’ money all year. The crypto fell for much of the month, even on days when AI chip stocks rallied – the divergence suggests how investors view the two classes.
Gabe Selby of CF Benchmarks said much of the new money and attention has focused on AI plays, leaving crypto fighting for a smaller share of the overall risk appetite.
Rotation appeared in places that directly fueled crypto.
When gold, silver and bitcoin sold off together in recent weeks as a hedge unraveled, cash leaving these hard assets flowed into AI stocks rather than bitcoin.
Even Bitcoin miners have shifted their computing capacity to hosting AI, where contract payments exceed mining revenue fluctuations.
South Korea’s $518 billion commitment is a decade-long bet that spending on AI infrastructure will be structural rather than fleeting. Crypto has spent the year on the other side of this flow, and the open question now is whether the money chasing AI chips and lists will eventually return or stay put.
