SK Hynix plans to buy back 40 trillion won ($29 billion) in shares, a move designed to calm investors amid mounting worries about spending on artificial intelligence, Bloomberg reported via CNBC-TV18 Markets on August 19, 2026.

Market backdrop

The announcement came as Korean markets saw a selloff. The Kospi, South Korea's benchmark stock index, tumbled, and chip stocks such as Samsung Electronics were caught in the decline.

The concerns around AI spending refer to investor unease over the large capital outlays that technology companies and cloud providers have been directing toward AI infrastructure and data centres.

The unease comes against an industry known for sharp cycles. Memory chipmaking has long swung between shortage-driven booms, when prices and profits surge, and oversupply-driven downturns, when they slump — a pattern that has historically made memory stocks sensitive to any shift in demand expectations.

About SK Hynix

SK Hynix Inc. is South Korea's second-largest chipmaker, after Samsung Electronics, and one of the world's largest producers of memory chips, including DRAM and NAND flash memory. Headquartered in Icheon, south of Seoul, the company is part of the SK Group conglomerate, and its shares trade on the Korea Exchange.

The company is a leading supplier of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a category of stacked DRAM chips used alongside AI accelerators in data-centre systems. SK Hynix supplies HBM to major AI chip developers, including Nvidia, whose graphics processors power much of the world's AI computing infrastructure. HBM carries a price premium over standard DRAM, reflecting the additional processing and packaging steps required to stack the chips, and its demand moves with shipments of AI accelerators — tying SK Hynix's results closely to the pace of the AI infrastructure buildout now under investor scrutiny.

What a share buyback does

Under a share buyback, a company repurchases its own stock from the market, reducing the number of shares outstanding. Buybacks are a widely used method of returning capital to shareholders. In SK Hynix's case, the repurchase programme was announced with the stated aim of calming investors at a time of worries about AI spending. With fewer shares in circulation, per-share measures such as earnings per share rise mechanically when profits hold steady. The programme's ultimate effect, however, depends on how it is executed — the pace and duration of repurchases — alongside the broader direction of memory prices and AI-related spending.

The report is credited to Bloomberg and was published by CNBC-TV18 Markets.