Dear Reader,
Good morning.
This is Simmy Adelman, stepping in for Dylan here.
Dylan is on the road with his family this week, showing his kids this beautiful country of ours.
So I'm holding down the fort.
And I have to say — he picked quite a week to leave.
Because this past Friday, something happened that I think most people completely missed.
The Second Biggest US Listing in History
SK Hynix (SYM: SKHYV) made its Nasdaq debut on Friday.
The South Korean memory chip giant raised $26.5 billion — the second largest US listing ever, right behind SpaceX last month.
The stock opened at $170, up 14% from its $149 IPO price.
Wall Street was excited.
But here's the thing.
While everyone was watching the stock price, the chairman of SK Group said something in a Bloomberg TV interview that I think is far more important than the opening pop….
He floated the idea of "memory as a service."
What That Actually Means
Right now, if you want to compete in AI, you buy chips.
Billions of dollars worth of chips.
You own them, you depreciate them, and you pray they don't become obsolete before you've gotten your money's worth.
What the SK Hynix chairman is suggesting is something completely different.
Instead of selling you the chip, they rent you the memory capacity.
You pay as you go.
You scale up when you need more.
You scale down when you don't.
Think about what Amazon did with computing power in the 2000s.
Before AWS, companies had to buy their own servers.
Massive upfront costs.
Huge maintenance headaches.
Then Amazon said — what if you just rented it?
AWS didn't just change Amazon.
It changed the entire internet.
Memory as a service could do the same thing to AI.
And here's the thing nobody is talking about in any of this.
Whether companies buy memory or rent it, whether they own the chips or lease them, one thing doesn't change.
All of it needs enormous amounts of power to run.
Every data center, every AI factory, every memory chip humming away at scale — it all draws power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Dylan has been doing a lot of research on what he thinks is the most overlooked energy source in the entire AI race — one that's cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable than nuclear, and that almost nobody on Wall Street is talking about yet.
We just published a full report on it.
What It Means for the AI Race
Right now, access to memory is a billionaire's game.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have spent hundreds of billions buying chips outright.
That hardware ownership is part of what gives them their competitive edge.
But if SK Hynix starts renting memory to anyone willing to pay, that edge shrinks.
A startup with $10 million could suddenly access the same memory infrastructure as Google.
The playing field levels in a way the hyperscalers would not love.
And here's the really uncomfortable question for those hyperscalers.
They've been justifying enormous capital spending to their investors by arguing that owning the infrastructure is essential.
If renting becomes viable and cheaper, investors are going to start asking — why did you spend $200 billion on chips you could have rented?
The Flip Side
Now here's where it gets interesting.
The hyperscalers might actually benefit from this too — just not in the way you'd expect.
Microsoft's entire enterprise pitch is built around getting companies to consume AI through their platform rather than building the infrastructure themselves.
If SK Hynix rents memory to Microsoft cheaply, Microsoft's margins on their cloud AI services could actually go up.
So the same idea that threatens their moat could also fatten their margins.
That tension is going to be worth watching very closely over the next few years.
The Bigger Picture
Dylan has spent the last two weeks talking about the AI five-layer cake.
Energy, chips, infrastructure, models, applications.
Memory as a service doesn't just change one layer.
It potentially reshapes the economics of the entire stack.
SK Hynix controls 58% of the global high-bandwidth memory market.
The chairman says the memory shortage could last until 2030.
HBM demand is growing 42% annually.
And now the world's dominant memory supplier is floating the idea of becoming the AWS of memory.
That is not a small idea.
Most people were watching the stock price.
But I'd recommend watching the interview.
Have a wonderful Monday.
I'll see you tomorrow.
All the best,
Simmy Adelman, Editor-in-Chief
Behind the Markets
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Written by Simcha Adelman