SK Hynix recorded $67.2 billion in revenue in 2025, a 42.3% increase from the previous year, while Intel brought in $48.5 billion over the same period, down 3.7%. The reversal lifted SK Hynix from fourth to third place among the world's largest chip suppliers, leaving Intel just behind it. Revenue rankings are a snapshot of where the industry's value pools, and this one reflects how thoroughly AI demand is reordering the semiconductor supply chain.

Memory Had a Very Good Year

The engine behind SK Hynix's surge is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM — a technology that stacks DRAM dies and pipes data to processors along wide pathways. It functions as the express lane feeding AI accelerators; without it, a top-tier accelerator spends considerable time waiting for data to arrive. HBM typically sits inside the same package as the accelerator it feeds, and unlike commodity DRAM it is engineered closely around each processor generation — part of why the memory business is no longer defined purely by thin margins and punishing pricing cycles.

SK Hynix holds roughly 50% of the HBM market. That share has slipped slightly as Samsung gains ground, but SK Hynix remains the leading HBM supplier to Nvidia. How quickly Samsung closes the gap is one of the most closely watched dynamics in memory.

The profitability is the eye-catching part. SK Hynix posted operating margins of around 76% in the second quarter of 2026, driven by strength in HBM and DRAM. For context, that means roughly three of every four revenue dollars survived operating costs — territory virtually unheard of in the memory industry's boom-and-bust history.

The broader picture tilts the same way. The top 10 chip suppliers captured two-thirds of a record semiconductor market in 2025. Memory makers Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, along with Nvidia, drove most of that growth.

Intel was the one exception. It was the sole decliner among the top 10 in a year when the overall market hit a record. The company has also been reporting net losses — a sharp contrast to SK Hynix, whose margins look more like those of a software firm than a hardware manufacturer.

Intel's Response: Raise Cash, Partner Up

In August 2026, Intel completed an upsized $20 billion common stock offering. The deal sold 210.5 million shares at $95 each, with proceeds earmarked for general corporate purposes, including capital expenditures — a reminder of how capital-intensive leading-edge chipmaking remains.

Then on October 6, 2026, Intel and Applied Materials announced a technical collaboration. The work will take place at Applied's EPIC Center and Intel's Oregon R&D site, targeting next-generation transistors, interconnect scaling, and advanced packaging for AI workloads. Advanced packaging is the same family of techniques that makes HBM's die-stacking possible, putting the partnership inside the technologies AI data centers run on. Whether the fresh capital and this tie-up begin to bend Intel's trajectory is the question hanging over next year's ranking.