SEOUL — When South Korean billionaire Chey Tae-won steps up to ring the bell at SK Hynix’s $26.5 billion Nasdaq listing ceremony on Friday, it will represent the ultimate vindication of a business decision that many once dismissed as foolhardy: purchasing a money-losing chipmaker that has since grown into a dominant force in the artificial intelligence industry.
SK Group’s purchase of Hynix back in 2012 was met with skepticism — even from within the conglomerate itself. Memory chips are known for their boom-and-bust cycles and require enormous capital investment. At the time, the company was bleeding money and lagging behind Samsung Electronics in both market share and technology.
But Chey had a vision. Determined to find an edge over Samsung, he steered SK Hynix toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips — a niche technology at the time — and committed to that direction for more than a decade. That long-term bet proved to be a stroke of genius when HBM emerged as an essential ingredient in Nvidia’s AI accelerator chips, propelling SK Hynix to become the world’s top producer of the technology.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made clear just how important that partnership has been. Speaking to reporters in Seoul in June, with the 65-year-old Chey standing at his side, Huang said: “SK is our largest memory partner. Without SK’s partnership, today’s AI industry would not have developed as wonderfully as it has.”
Kim Dae-il, a former SK Hynix board member and economics professor at Seoul National University, noted that Chey chose to elevate executives from within Hynix rather than importing managers from elsewhere in the SK Group. He pointed to Park Sung-wook, a veteran chip engineer appointed as CEO in 2013, as a key figure who refused to abandon HBM even when board members expressed doubt.
“There was enormous investment behind SK Hynix’s rise to that position. Ultimately, Chairman Chey’s achievement was making the right bets and putting the right people in place,” Kim said.
SK Hynix and SK Group did not respond to requests for comment.
Even as SK Hynix surfs the AI wave, Chey — who studied physics at Korea University and later pursued postgraduate work in economics at the University of Chicago — is grappling with concerns that demand may not keep up with the rapid rise in memory prices.
“We are facing a shortage of memory supply, which in some ways is a welcome problem for me,” Chey acknowledged in a speech delivered in April. “People may say, ‘Isn’t it good because you’re making a lot of money?’ But this situation cannot last forever,” he added.
Earlier this month, both SK Hynix and Samsung announced plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new chip manufacturing facilities in South Korea, responding to surging demand after President Lee Jae Myung called for steps to reduce regional economic inequality. However, those expansion plans have sparked fresh worries about the possibility of oversupply in the notoriously volatile memory chip sector.
Chey serves as chairman of SK Group, a massive conglomerate with business interests spanning telecommunications, refining, and construction. He is not a direct shareholder of SK Hynix, but holds the largest stake in SK Inc., which in turn owns a 32% share in SK Square — SK Hynix’s top shareholder. Forbes estimates his personal wealth at $5.4 billion.
Chey stands out among South Korean business titans, most of whom tend to stay out of the public eye. His career has been marked by both controversy and personal hardship. In 2015, he published a letter in a local newspaper openly admitting he had grown apart from his then-wife and had fathered a child with another woman who had provided him emotional support. The unusually candid confession from a Korean business leader sparked divided reactions in a society where extramarital relationships carry deep social stigma.
Chey is currently embroiled in a bitter divorce lawsuit involving hundreds of millions of dollars — a case with potential implications for the ownership structure of South Korea’s second-largest conglomerate after Samsung Group.
His past also includes a prison sentence of more than two years for embezzling corporate funds. He received a presidential pardon in 2015, with the government at the time stating that freeing Chey and other business figures was intended to allow them to contribute to the country’s economic development.
Yet as SK Hynix takes center stage in the global AI revolution, the story of the businessman once ridiculed for buying a failing chipmaker is increasingly being rewritten as one of the boldest and most successful corporate wagers in South Korean history.
