The AI winner everyone’s still talking about
Bain Capital just cashed out of Kioxia after a monster run, turning a once-private Toshiba spinout into one of Japan’s hottest AI trades. The shares have ripped more than 4,000% since Kioxia’s December 2024 IPO, which is the kind of number that makes even seasoned dealmakers blink twice.
SK Hynix still has skin in the game
Here’s the fun twist: SK Hynix isn’t fully out of the picture. A special-purpose vehicle tied to the South Korean chipmaker still owns about 14% of Kioxia, so investors in HXSCF get a backdoor look at another corner of the AI supply chain.
That matters because SK Hynix is usually thought of as the HBM house — the company feeding Nvidia’s AI accelerators with the premium memory they crave. But this Kioxia stake adds a second layer to the story:
- HBM helps power AI compute today
- NAND flash/storage could become more important as AI models get bigger and inference workloads balloon
- Kioxia has also been gearing up for next-gen flash memory aimed at AI use cases
Why investors should care
If you own SK Hynix, you’re not just betting on one chip category anymore. You’re also getting exposure to a storage play that’s been catching the same AI tailwind, just with less of the spotlight and more of the “wait, they own that too?” energy.
Big picture: Bain got the headline exit, but SK Hynix may still be holding a quiet AI lottery ticket.