Citi Downplays CXMT Threat as SK Hynix Charts a Future Beyond HBM
Published on 10/17/2026 at 16:51 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Seoul, South Korea — A week of turbulence in the memory chip sector is giving way to a more measured reassessment, as analysts push back against fears that Chinese competition poses an imminent threat to SK Hynix's dominance in high-performance DRAM.
The anxiety was triggered by comments from CXMT President Cao Kanyu at a conference in Shanghai, where the Chinese memory maker announced progress on a novel 4F²-DRAM cell architecture and said it aims to introduce a DDR5-RDIMM server module by year-end. Investors reacted swiftly, with SK Hynix shares briefly losing more than ten percent in Seoul on Tuesday before closing the session down 9.47 percent. Foreign investors sold a net 2.36 trillion won worth of the stock.
Citi, however, sees the sell-off as overdone. The investment bank's analysts argue that mass production based on the 4F² architecture is unlikely before 2028, and note that CXMT remains four generations behind the world's leading DRAM manufacturers. Fears of an immediate supply glut in high-performance memory are therefore not justified, they concluded.
A Broader Debate Over AI Spending
The CXMT announcement landed in a market already on edge. Questions have been mounting about how durable the earnings from the artificial intelligence memory boom will prove to be. Sentiment took a hit after Broadcom chief Hock Tan publicly questioned the returns on the massive capital being poured into data centers and AI infrastructure. Those remarks rippled straight through to Asia's chip heavyweights.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SK Hynix?
On a seven-day view, SK Hynix stock is down 24 percent. The shares closed Friday at 1,272,000.00 KRW, a modest gain of 0.8 percent on the day. Despite the correction, the stock remains up 96 percent since the start of the year, though it now sits 57 percent below its 52-week high.
Earnings Momentum Builds
Attention is rotating back toward fundamentals. Analyst Han Dong-hee of SK Securities said Thursday that profit forecasts for the coming year are being revised upward, driven by tightening memory supply and rising prices for High Bandwidth Memory. The company's third-quarter 2026 results are expected in late October, with financial circles pointing to October 27 and 28 as likely dates.
SK Hynix is not standing still on the technology front either. At the SEDEX trade fair on Wednesday, the company's development chief stressed that HBM alone will not be enough to secure lasting leadership in AI memory, signaling a broader strategic push into complementary technologies.
Building Out the Portfolio
At the OCP Global Summit, the chipmaker unveiled several new concepts, including the MARS modular rack architecture and High Bandwidth Flash. It also presented a 256-gigabyte CMM-DDR5 memory module built on the CXL 3.2 standard, which the company says delivers 80 gigabytes per second of bandwidth and roughly 30 percent better energy efficiency than the previous generation.
The upcoming quarterly report will need to show whether operating profitability can keep pace with those technological ambitions — and whether the market's recent nerves were anything more than a passing bout of skepticism.
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