SK Hynix's parent company plans to build an AI data center, causing its stock price to soar to a 20-year high.

Benefiting from the AI boom this year, South Korean chip maker SK Hynix's stock price has surged nearly 50% year-to-date. Following a big jump on Monday, the stock continued its upward trend on Tuesday, rising nearly 3% to reach a more than 20-year high. Over the weekend, there were reports that SK Group plans to build South Korea's largest artificial intelligence (AI) data center. According to reports from South Korean domestic media, SK Group, the parent company of SK Hynix, plans to collaborate with Amazon.com, Inc.'s web services (AWS.US) to build an AI data center in Ulsan. It is understood that SK Telecom and SK Broadband will lead the project, with support from other affiliated companies including SK Hynix. SK Hynix is a leading supplier of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). DRAM is a type of semiconductor memory widely used in personal computers, workstations, and servers for storing data and program code. Its DRAM competitor Samsung Electronics saw its stock price rise by 4% on Tuesday, but the increase still lagged behind SK Hynix. Last Friday, reports said that Samsung Electronics' market value fell to a nine-year low of 345.1 trillion won (approximately $252 billion), as the chip giant struggles to meet the demands driven by AI. Meanwhile, SK Hynix has become a leading enterprise in the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) field - this type of DRAM is used in AI servers, with customers including AI giant NVIDIA Corporation, among others.