SK Hynix raises $26.5 billion on Nasdaq — the largest US debut by any foreign firm

The factory that does not exist yet is what investors are paying for. SK Hynix, the South Korean company that makes the high-bandwidth memory chips inside every serious AI data center, priced 177.9 million American depositary receipts at $149 each — the largest US market debut ever recorded by a company incorporated outside the United States. It surpasses every prior foreign listing by a distance that reflects the singular position SK Hynix holds in the global AI supply chain.

Demand was decisive. Institutional investors submitted orders worth more than seven times the shares available. Three cornerstone backers — Baillie Gifford Overseas, Coatee Management, and Situational Awareness Partners — committed a combined $7 billion before the book opened to the broader market. SK Hynix’s American depositary shares now trade on Nasdaq under the ticker SKHY.

The case for the listing rests on a physical fact: there are not enough HBM chips. High-bandwidth memory connects the processor and the memory inside AI hardware. It determines how fast an AI model can move data through itself. Without a steady and expanding supply, the AI buildout that has driven hundreds of billions of dollars of capital investment over the past two years runs into a ceiling. SK Hynix dominates the global HBM market. Samsung, its closest competitor by volume, is behind on next-generation HBM specifications. NVIDIA‘s CEO has publicly identified SK Hynix as his company’s largest partner. The $26.5 billion goes into new fabs, advanced packaging lines, and next-generation equipment designed to maintain that lead.

The HBM market is forecast to grow from $65 billion this year to $290 billion by 2030. That forecast is where the skepticism lives. SK Hynix trades at 5.5 times forward earnings, below Micron’s 6.66 times, which suggests the market has already discounted some of that optimism into the price. The stock had dropped 25% in the two weeks before pricing — a meaningful retreat for a company up 680% over the prior twelve months. What the 7x oversubscription says is that institutional investors read the drop as an entry point, not a warning. The pricing at a 2.9% premium to Seoul’s three-day average confirms they paid to get in.

The parties most exposed to whether this bet pays off are not the shareholders. They are the data center operators at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, whose AI buildout timelines depend on HBM supply remaining adequate. A shortage means higher prices for AI compute, which flows through to the businesses and consumers who use AI services. For the companies deploying AI across their operations — banks, hospitals, retailers, logistics firms — compute cost is already a quarterly negotiation. The listing converts that supply-chain dependency into a tradeable position.

Whether the $290 billion forecast holds will depend on whether the hyperscalers continue their pace of AI capital expenditure, or whether slowing performance gains reduce urgency for ever-larger training runs. Shares began trading on Nasdaq on Friday, July 10, under the ticker SKHY. SK Hynix is expected to report quarterly results later this month.

Tags: semiconductor, Nasdaq, AI chips, HBM, SK Hynix