A 944 billion won divorce settlement was awarded in the ruling of South Korea's "century divorce case", and AI has made this divorce much more expensive.

On July 24, the Seoul High Court of South Korea issued a ruling in the second-instance retrial of the divorce property division case involving Choi Tae-won, Chairman of the SK Group, and his ex-wife Roh So-young, Director of the Butterfly Art Center, ordering Choi Tae-won to pay Roh So-young 944 billion won (approximately 4.598 billion RMB) as property division compensation.

Following this ruling, both parties can still file an appeal with the Supreme Court. This nearly 9-year-long litigation is finally drawing to a close, but the issues it has addressed have long gone far beyond the marriage itself.

One side is the head of a South Korean storage giant, while the other is the eldest daughter of former South Korean President Roh Tae-woo. This union, once hailed as South Korea's "Wedding of the Century", has ended in a "Divorce of the Century". As the AI boom drives up SK Hynix's stock price, disputes over control of SK Hynix and massive wealth have continued to escalate.

Nearly 9 Years of Tug-of-War Over Property Division

In December 2015, shortly after his 55th birthday, Choi Tae-won chose not to hold a press conference or issue a statement through his lawyer, but instead published a three-page open letter in South Korean media.

In the letter, he admitted that he had maintained an extramarital affair for many years and had a child with another woman. He wrote that an insurmountable gap had long existed between him and his wife, that "he had done his utmost but could not salvage the relationship", and therefore decided to make the relationship public and end their 27-year marriage.

To describe this relationship, he even quoted the opening line of Tolstoy's *Anna Karenina*: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

The news sent shockwaves across South Korea. Because the other protagonist in the letter was no ordinary person: she was Roh So-young, the eldest daughter of Roh Tae-woo, the 13th President of South Korea. Their marriage was once regarded as the most representative example of a political-business union in South Korea. In 1988, the couple held their wedding at the Blue House, shortly after Roh Tae-woo took office as president, and South Korean media described the event as the "Wedding of the Century".

More than 30 years later, this fairy-tale marriage ultimately came to a different end. In 2017, Choi Tae-won formally filed for divorce, and the two sides entered into a nearly 9-year legal tug-of-war over property division.

The court of first instance ruled in 2022 that Choi Tae-won should pay 66.5 billion won in property division compensation and 100 million won in damages for mental distress; in May 2024, the appellate court sharply increased the property division amount to 1.38 trillion won, and awarded 2 billion won in mental distress damages. Subsequently, the Supreme Court of Korea in October 2025 overturned the part of the second-instance ruling related to property division and remanded the case for retrial, while upholding the divorce judgment for both parties.

Until this latest ruling, the final amount was set at 944 billion won. Although it was lower than the previous second-instance figure, it was still far higher than the outcome of the first trial.

AI Made This Divorce Far More Expensive

Without this wave of artificial intelligence development, this nearly 9-year divorce case might not have once again become the focus of South Korean public opinion. What truly changed the value involved in the case is SK Hynix.

As the core asset of the SK Group, SK Hynix has become one of NVIDIA's most important suppliers thanks to HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). Over the past two years, as global AI infrastructure entered a new investment cycle, HBM has been in short supply, and SK Hynix has experienced its strongest growth since its founding.

In fiscal year 2025, the company recorded revenue of 97.15 trillion won and operating profit of 47.21 trillion won, doubling year-on-year; entering 2026, its growth momentum further accelerated, with first-quarter revenue reaching 52.58 trillion won, a 198% year-on-year increase, and operating profit surging 405% year-on-year to hit a new all-time high.

AI has not only brought performance growth, but also a full revaluation of the asset value of the entire SK Group. As one of South Korea's four major chaebols, the SK Group spans multiple industries including semiconductors, energy, telecommunications, and biomedicine, but its most important profit engine today is SK Hynix.

As the capital market continues to raise the company's valuation, the value of Choi Tae-won's equity in the SK Group has also risen accordingly. This has gradually transformed the divorce litigation, which originally centered on marital relations, into a legal dispute over how to determine the value of massive equity holdings.

This is exactly the core of the dispute between the two sides. Roh So-young's side argues that she has long participated in family business operations and maintained the chaebol system, making undeniable contributions to the development of the SK Group, so the property division should be calculated based on the latest asset value boosted by the AI-driven stock price surge; Choi Tae-won's side, by contrast, maintains that the value growth of SK Hynix in recent years brought by the AI boom mainly stems from the company's operations and industrial layout, has nothing to do with Roh So-young, and should not be divided as jointly created marital property.

Judging from the final ruling amount of 944 billion won, the court has to a certain extent recognized the substantial increase in the SK Group's asset value in recent years, but did not fully adopt the claims put forward by Roh So-young's side.

For the capital market, what draws more attention than the ruling amount is the payment method. The court has not yet clarified whether the huge 944 billion won property share will be paid in cash or in the form of stocks. If the compensation obligation is ultimately fulfilled in cash, it means Choi Tae-won does not need to sell large amounts of SK Group shares to raise funds, which will help avoid the equity dilution and stock price fluctuations that the market previously worried about.

In fact, the AI wealth effect is still continuously expanding.

SK Hynix has announced that it will double its wafer production capacity over the next five years, and plans to invest more than 250 billion US dollars in South Korea to build chip manufacturing bases. Last year, the company also adjusted its profit-sharing mechanism, allocating 10% of its operating profit directly to a bonus pool. Calculated based on its fiscal 2025 performance, more than 30,000 employees can receive an average of about 140 million won in bonuses. "SK Hynix employee" once became widely regarded on South Korean social media as the "best blind date partner", serving as the most representative microcosm of wealth in the AI super cycle.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Time Weekly" (ID: timeweekly), author: Zhu Chengcheng, editor: Guo Ruyi, published with authorization from 36Kr.