BlockBeats News, July 24th - The divorce property division case between SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and his ex-wife Roh So-young has become more sensitive due to the AI chip wave. SK Hynix, with its key position in the NVIDIA supply chain thanks to HBM, has become one of the hottest Korean assets in the global AI capital expenditure cycle. What was originally a long-standing chaebol marriage dispute has been transformed by the surge in stock price and market value, directly raising Chey Tae-won's wealth and the market's imagination of SK's ownership, turning this family matter into a capital market event.

SK Group, controlled by Chey Tae-won, owns core asset SK Hynix, one of the most important high-bandwidth memory suppliers in NVIDIA's AI chip supply chain. With the explosion in HBM demand, SK Hynix's stock price and valuation have skyrocketed, pushing Chey Tae-won's personal wealth to around $5 billion. According to The Wall Street Journal, his ex-wife Roh So-young is seeking to claim half of it.

The core of the dispute is whether Chey Tae-won's shares in SK Inc. should be considered marital property and at which valuation these shares should be assessed. The South Korean Supreme Court had previously confirmed the divorce between the two and awarded a ₩20 billion compensation for emotional distress, but overturned the Seoul High Court's decision on the ₩1.38 trillion asset split, sending back the property division part for reconsideration. The Seoul High Court will issue a new ruling on July 24th.

BlockBeats previously detailed the Chey family in an on-site article "The Heirs of SK Hynix's Trillion-Dollar Empire". This marriage was once dubbed the "wedding of the century" in Korea. Chey Tae-won married Roh So-young in 1988, the daughter of former South Korean President Roh Tae-woo, a union that was seen as a symbol of the marriage between political and business elites in Korea. In 2015, Chey Tae-won publicly admitted to an extramarital affair and fathered a son with another woman, leading to a protracted divorce battle.

Of Chey Tae-won and Roh So-young's three children, their eldest daughter, Chey Yoon-jung, joined SK Biopharmaceuticals and SK Inc.'s growth support department, their second daughter, Chey Min-jung, initially worked at SK Hynix in international trade and policy affairs before moving to AI medical entrepreneurship, and their son, Chey In-geon, transitioned from SK E&S to McKinsey. While all three are linked to the group's future, none of them has been explicitly identified by the market as a traditional "heir."

For the market, SK Hynix remains one of the key Asian targets in the AI storage chain; for the SK family, the more important Hynix becomes, the harder it is for inheritance and marital litigation to remain merely at the private level. The AI boom has inflated Hynix's valuation and raised the external costs of all arrangements within the SK family. How the court handles the property division, how Chey Tae-won maintains control, and how the third generation establishes operational legitimacy will all become focal points of market attention going forward.