SK Chairman sold shares to pay off the divorce debt, and Dell (DELL.US) took over 400 million US dollars: Did you buy SK Hynix chip supply priority?

Zhitong Finance App learned that according to regulatory documents, SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won has agreed to sell 1.34% of the holding company SK Inc.'s shares and 972,493 shares to DFO Public Investments, L.P., for 544 billion won (approximately US$406 million). The fund is registered in Delaware, USA, and is part of DFO Management — the family investment office of Michael Dell (Michael Dell), founder of Dell Technologies (DELL.US). According to reports, the predecessor of DFO Management was MSD Capital, founded by Michael Dell in 1998, and changed its name to the current name at the end of 2022.

This deal is part of Choi Tae-won's personal financial arrangement. He plans to raise 944 billion won (about 704 million US dollars) through the sale of SK Inc. shares to pay divorce compensation to his ex-wife Roh Soh-yeong (Art Center Nabi curator); 681,431 shares (0.94% of the company) will be sold to Korean investment securities for 400 billion won. When SK Inc. first disclosed the plan earlier this month, buyers of the remaining shares were only vaguely referred to as “strategic investors” because the other party decided to invest after “considering SK Inc.'s business competitiveness and medium- to long-term growth prospects.” Wednesday's documents revealed the answers.

The relationship between the two companies: Why did an AI server vendor buy SK's holding company

What's interesting is not the deal itself, but who is buying it. Dell Technologies is a major supplier of AI servers and data center infrastructure, and SK Inc. is the holding company of SK Group and the largest shareholder of SK Hynix, the group's storage subsidiary, and the two form a parent and subsidiary relationship.

Dell's relationship with SK Hynix is far more specific than an equity investment. According to an official press release from SK Hynix, the company is Dell's “core partner” (core partner) and has continuously participated in the Dell Technologies Forum held by Dell in Seoul since 2023; SK Hynix delivered a keynote speech as a partner representative for the first time at DTF 2026 held on August 25, 2026 -- Zhu Young-pyo, vice president in charge of system architecture, proposed direct memory under the title “The Invisible Engine” The “3D stacking” concept stacked on top of the GPU believes that the stacking height of existing HBM alone is no longer sufficient to meet the burgeoning data processing needs of proxy AI. At the booth, SK Hynix presented products such as HBM4 wafers and HBM4E, 192GB SOCAMM2, server DRAM, and enterprise-grade SSD (eSSD); in the “AI Reality” exhibition area, its 6400MT/s DDR5 RDIMM and PS1010 E3.S were integrated into the Dell R770 server system and displayed.

The Dell side is just as sizable. Dell's revenue for the second quarter of fiscal year 2027 (ending July 31, 2026) was $46.97 billion, up 58% year over year; Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) revenue was $31.78 billion, up 89% year over year, and operating margin rose to 15%. AI server orders for the quarter reached a record $60.9 billion, and the backlog of orders at the end of the quarter was $95 billion, almost double the $51.3 billion at the end of the previous quarter. Cumulative AI server orders over the past 12 months exceeded $130 billion. Dell has raised its full-year revenue guidance to $192 billion and raised its AI server revenue target for the 2027 fiscal year from $60 billion to $74 billion.

But what supports this order book is storage. Dell management listed DRAM and NAND as the main supply bottlenecks during the earnings call. Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke said bluntly that the reason the company raised prices was due to rising costs of components such as memory — in other words, Dell passed on the memory price increase to customers, and what it needed itself was a stable supply.

Supply shortages are the key: tech giants “hold money” to find SK Hynix

This supply anxiety did not come out of nowhere. According to a May report, many of the world's largest technology companies are vying to approach SK Hynix and are proposing to invest in their own memory chip production line or even to buy expensive manufacturing equipment for them. Six people familiar with the matter revealed that one of the proposals targets the first phase of a large-scale fab project being built by SK Hynix at the Yongin (Yongin) Park in South Korea. The plant is expected to focus on DRAM production; another customer proposed funding to purchase ASML.US (ASML.US) extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, each worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

According to the report, such proposals are unprecedented in the global memory chip industry. And the cash-rich SK Hynix is cautious — two people familiar with the matter say the company is concerned that once it accepts funds from a specific buyer, it may be tied to that buyer and forced to supply at a lower price in exchange for a longer term revenue commitment. “Regardless of the type of proposal, the current usable capacity is essentially zero. Not even a small portion can be transferred to a specific customer,” said one person familiar with the matter. Another source mentioned that suppliers are extra careful when allocating scarce production capacity and don't want to “make the wrong bet” in the AI competition.

The way long-term contracts are being discussed is also changing. According to reports, one structure under discussion is a “price range mechanism,” which sets an upper and lower limit on the annual chip price, thereby eliminating the practice of quarterly or seasonal bargaining; the other is a prepayment arrangement, which requires customers to pay 30% to 40% of the purchase price in advance.

SK Hynix's rank

The moment Dell took the initiative came just after SK Hynix jumped in volume. SK Hynix began temporary trading on NASDAQ on July 10, 2026, and switched to regular trading on July 13. The code SKHY issued about 177.9 million ADS copies, with an issue price of 149 US dollars. The opening of the first day was about 14% higher than the issue price, raising a total of 26.5 billion US dollars, making it the largest IPO for a foreign company in the US.

In terms of share, according to IDC data quoted in its prospectus, SK Hynix's HBM market share in the first quarter of 2026 was 56.4%, while ranking the world's second largest DRAM supplier with a market share of 29.1% and the second largest NAND flash memory supplier with 18.5%.

Notably, in May 2026, the market capitalization of three storage vendors, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron, successively surpassed $1 trillion — storage, a racetrack that has long been regarded as a cyclical product, was repriced by the market as a strategic part of AI infrastructure.

Governance Red Line: Regulatory Questions Caused by a “Strategic Investment”

Going back to the deal itself, the trouble lies in the expression “strategic investor.” According to reports, the Korea Corporate Governance Forum (Korea Corporate Governance Forum) stated that if Choi Tae-won and the buyer even informally agree to exercise voting rights in the same way, the two parties must disclose that they are joint holders in accordance with the law; otherwise, it is a violation of Korea's capital market law. According to the forum, the term “strategic investor” itself suggests that the interests of both parties may coincide, and there is a risk that the DFO fund will be identified as Choi Tae-won's “concerted actor.”

According to reports, the forum also proposed in a comment on October 6 that the sale of shares needed to clarify whether the intention was to circumvent an enhanced 3% rule that will take effect at next year's shareholders' meeting. Also, according to the report, the portion of the shares sold to Korea Investment Securities comes with a three-year price-earnings swap (PRS) arrangement — at maturity, it is settled according to the difference between the actual disposal price and the agreed reference price, that is, Choi Tae-won can benefit from rising stock prices and must also bear falling losses.