Key Points
- SK Hynix is selling 177.9 million Nasdaq ADRs, targeting about $28 billion, with pricing this week.
- The offering drew roughly $196 billion in orders — more than seven times oversubscribed.
- The ADRs will trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker SKHY.
- SK Hynix is Nvidia's top supplier of high-bandwidth memory for AI systems.
SK Hynix, the South Korean chipmaker that has become one of the most important names in the AI supply chain, is taking its stock to Wall Street. The company is selling 177.9 million American depositary receipts — a roughly $28 billion offering that will list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker SKHY, with final pricing due this week. It would rank among the largest-ever US debuts by a foreign company, and the book filled fast: the sale drew about $196 billion in orders, more than seven times the shares available, Yahoo Finance reported, with the proceeds earmarked for Korean fab expansion and EUV lithography equipment.
The pull is not hard to explain. SK Hynix is Nvidia's top supplier of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the specialized chips stacked alongside GPUs inside every AI training cluster, and its Korea-listed shares have run 770% over the past twelve months — outpacing even Micron Technology's 700% rally. Chief Executive Kwak Noh-jung is bringing that story to US investors at the moment memory has become the tightest link in the AI buildout.
What the offering really prices is the durability of the AI memory trade. A book this oversubscribed is the market underwriting the assumption that demand for HBM keeps compounding — the same bet embedded in SK Hynix's multiyear HBM4 memory pact with Nvidia for the Vera Rubin platform. It also lands in a crowded window for AI listings: OpenAI has confidentially filed for its own IPO, and the money moving through AI infrastructure keeps setting records, from SpaceX's $60 billion move for Cursor on down.
Weeks after the listing, SK Group and Nvidia announced a $500 billion-plus partnership to build AI infrastructure across South Korea.
The stakes reach past one company. SK Hynix and Samsung together account for roughly half the market capitalization of South Korea's KOSPI index, which has surged 87% year to date. "Samsung and SK Hynix helped the KOSPI triple over the past year after 17 years of doing nothing," Deutsche Bank wrote on July 3 — a reminder that a single Nasdaq listing is now a proxy for an entire national market's AI bet.
Source: Yahoo Finance, Fortune
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