SK Hynix: Lickin’ that chicken and beer
Joseph P Kennedy Sr, the father of JFK, is said to have realised it was time to sell out of Wall Street before the crash in October 1929 when he started to get stock tips from his shoeshine boy.
It may be that the equivalent moment for the boom in anything even vaguely AI-related may be dated to the day last week when the bosses of Nvidia, Samsung and Hyundai were pictured enjoying fried chicken and a beer in a restaurant in Seoul, and the share price of a rival fried chicken chain promptly spiked by 20%.
With Nvidia’s market capitalisation hitting $5-trillion and both Apple and Microsoft around $4-trillion, the household names are in clover, but even less instantly recognisable names such as SK Hynix are powering ahead. The company accounts for more than half of the market in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips; it is the leading supplier to Nvidia, and its share price has more than tripled this year as it announced record third-quarter profits of $8bn, up 62% year on year.
SK Hynix has already sold its entire production of semiconductors for 2026, and that was before it signed a preliminary agreement with OpenAI to supply its $500bn Stargate data centre. The company estimated that demand from Stargate would amount to more than twice the industry’s current HBM capacity and admitted that demand was rising so fast it would take a while for supply to catch up. With metrics like that working in its favour, it’s safe to say that the fried chicken and the beers should keep on flowing.
Onset Financial: Red flags over Utah
It’s easy to spot them with the benefit of hindsight, but a cursory glance at Onset Financial’s performance over the past few years throws up more red flags than a May Day parade in Moscow in the 1950s.
Founded in 2008 in that well-known financial centre Draper, Utah, by the time it was in its teens it had the requisite shiny new campus complete with underground golf simulator. Then last year it bought a jet and opened another office in St George, which included a 1,115m² penthouse for its CEO, Justin Nielsen.
Onset specialises in equipment leasing, and it emphasises its flexibility as opposed to the rigid and strict assessment structures of banks and mainstream lenders. This helped its loan book to grow at considerable speed, particularly when it started dishing the money out to First Brands, a client that soon came to dominate its portfolio until the party stopped abruptly when First Brands filed for bankruptcy and Onset found itself the firm’s biggest creditor, scrambling to recover a debt it estimates at $1.9bn.
The Utah financial community is dominated by the Mormon Church, and many are going to have to be Latter-day Saints indeed to forgive Nielsen for dragging them into this unholy mess.
Onset may be the largest of First Brands’ creditors, but there are some big and powerful names on the list, and the salvaging of whatever may be left in the wreckage is going to be long and complex. Allegations of fraud and double-pledging of receivables have prompted an investigation by the department of justice, and lawyers galore are lining up to feast on the carcass.
