The SK Hynix Nasdaq listing has raised approximately $26.5 billion, making the South Korean chipmaker’s debut the largest by a foreign company in US stock market history. The record it broke belonged to Alibaba, which raised $21.8 billion in 2014, and only SpaceX’s IPO last month ranks as a bigger share sale anywhere.
SK Hynix makes the memory chips that sit inside nearly every serious AI system, and it has priced its American depositary receipts at $149 apiece, with trading set to begin today under the ticker SKHY.
The size of the raise says as much about the moment as the company. Investors queued for a business that makes one of the few components the AI boom cannot function without, and the offering was more than seven times oversubscribed, according to Reuters, quoting people familiar with the matter,
Cornerstone investors, including Baillie Gifford Overseas, funds managed by Coatue Management, and Situational Awareness Partners, collectively indicated interest in up to $7 billion of the ADRs. Situational Awareness is the AI infrastructure fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, which says something about who considers memory the scarce commodity of the AI buildout.
The appetite reflects a Seoul-listed stock that has climbed more than 200% this year, taking the company’s market value past $1 trillion.
The structure of the deal matters as much as its size. This is no cash-out for early investors. SK Hynix said the proceeds will fund a new semiconductor fabrication plant and an advanced chip packaging facility in South Korea, alongside 11.9 trillion won of extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment scheduled for installation by the end of next year.
American capital, in other words, is being raised at record scale to build Korean manufacturing capacity, at the precise moment that capacity has become the bottleneck of the AI economy. The reason investors queued anyway is high-bandwidth memory, the stacked chips inside every serious AI accelerator. SK Hynix holds an estimated 50 to 55% of the HBM market, counting Nvidia and Alphabet’s Google among its largest customers.
KAIST electrical engineering professor Yoo Hoi-jun put the investment case in a sentence, calling the company “indispensable” for as long as demand for GPUs and AI data centres holds.
The listing changes the competitive picture well beyond today. American investors who wanted to bet on AI memory had essentially one direct option until now: Micron. From tonight, they can also buy the market leader in HBM, and analysts expect that access to a far larger pool of investors will lift SK Hynix’s valuation closer to its US rival’s.
There’s precedent for that. TSMC’s shares trade at a premium in New York compared with Taipei, largely because a US listing put the company in front of global funds that never touched the Taiwanese exchange. Nobody will be watching that effect more closely than Samsung, whose memory business still trades only in Seoul.
The cyclical caveat belongs in any honest account of a memory company. DRAM’s booms have always carried busts, a 200% run leaves plenty of good news already in the price, and the same peak-cycle worry has weighed on Micron and Samsung shares in recent sessions.
SK Hynix’s first earnings as a dual-listed company will land with consensus expecting revenue of around 83 trillion won, which is where the new American shareholders find out whether they bought the AI era’s most indispensable supplier or the top of another memory cycle.
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