SK Hynix

The AI boom runs on memory chips. And the people who make those chips are about to walk off the job. On May 21, nearly 45,000 Samsung Electronics workers plan to begin an 18-day strike — the largest walkout in semiconductor history. Their target: the fabrication plants that produce the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips without which every Nvidia GPU, every AI data center, and every large language model is functionally dead weight. ...

Everyone’s talking about Nvidia’s new chips. But there’s a quieter, arguably more important war happening underneath all the GTC 2026 keynote spectacle — and it’s being fought by two Korean companies most people can’t tell apart. Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are locked in an increasingly fierce battle to supply the memory chips that make AI possible. Without high-bandwidth memory (HBM), Nvidia’s fancy GPUs are just expensive paperweights. And at GTC 2026 this week, both companies showed up swinging. ...