Hong Kong’s $13 billion ETF has started moving SK Hynix shares on its own — the AI memory market leader

A Hong Kong leveraged ETF with $13 billion in assets has grown so large that its daily rebalancing has become an independent market force moving SK Hynix share prices, reports Bloomberg on July 1, 2026. The fund has reached a scale where its daily rebalancing has transformed into a standalone market factor.

Why SK Hynix is called the world's leading AI stock

SK Hynix is the largest manufacturer of high-bandwidth memory HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), which is installed in AI accelerators from Nvidia, AMD and other companies. Without HBM, training and inference of large language models is impossible: Nvidia's flagship Blackwell series chips are equipped with tens of gigabytes of this specific type of memory.

The company's shares became one of the few liquid instruments allowing public investors to bet on the growth of AI infrastructure. The shares trade on the Korean Stock Exchange (KOSPI), and as the AI boom accelerated, interest from Asian investors surged sharply — creating fertile ground for the emergence of large derivative products.

How a $13 billion ETF began to move markets

The mechanics of a leveraged ETF with double leverage are straightforward: if the underlying asset rises 3%, the fund must rise 6%; if it falls, it falls 6%. To maintain the declared leverage each trading day, the manager is obliged to rebalance the portfolio: buy shares on rallies or sell on declines.

With modest assets this is unnoticed. At $13 billion — it is not.

• Fund size: $13 billion
• Underlying asset: SK Hynix shares (KOSPI: 000660)
• Registration: Hong Kong
• Type: leveraged ETF with margin

At the end of each trading session the fund is forced to enter the market with large orders — in the hundreds of millions of dollars in one direction or the other. This further amplifies the already existing price movement: gains become sharper, declines become deeper. The effect is particularly noticeable because a substantial portion of SK Hynix shares is concentrated among strategic shareholders, and daily free-float is limited.

"The fund has grown so large that it became a driving force itself," —

Bloomberg notes.

Why Hong Kong, not direct purchases on KOSPI

Hong Kong serves as a regional hub for structured products tied to shares in neighboring markets — Korea, Taiwan, Japan. Local infrastructure allows investors from Southeast Asia, the Middle East and other regions to gain exposure to the needed share without opening an account on a foreign exchange, in familiar trading hours and currency.

A leveraged ETF is a convenient instrument for retail investors wanting to "bet on AI chips" without dealing with futures or options. The fund's growth to $13 billion reflects the scale of demand: a bet on SK Hynix as a proxy for the entire AI sector proved more popular than any manager might have assumed at launch.

What this means

The situation with the Hong Kong ETF is a vivid example of how derivative instruments on AI stocks begin to take on lives of their own. The fund, created to reflect the dynamics of SK Hynix, itself became a factor in that dynamics. For long-term investors this means elevated short-term volatility unrelated to fundamental business metrics — quarterly earnings or HBM shipment forecasts.