SK Hynix has priced 177.9 million American depositary shares at $149 each, raising approximately $26.5 billion in its U.S. market debut.
The South Korean memory-chip maker’s listing on the Nasdaq surpasses Alibaba’s (BABA) $25 billion IPO from 2014, making it the largest U.S. offering ever by a foreign company.
Shares began trading on a when-issued basis and closed at $168.01, representing a 12.8% gain from the offer price, with regular trading under the SKHY ticker beginning Monday.
The offering was reportedly more than seven times oversubscribed, reflecting extraordinary investor appetite for exposure to the AI memory market.
Notably, the $149 per share pricing carried a premium of nearly 3% to the company’s closing price in Seoul, which is unusual given that large offerings typically require a discount to attract buyers at scale.
SK Hynix holds 58% of high-bandwidth memory revenue as of the first quarter of 2026, according to Counterpoint Research, making it the dominant player in a market critical to AI infrastructure.
High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, is the specialized chip that feeds data to the processors used in training and running artificial intelligence models, placing SK Hynix at the center of the AI buildout.
The company’s Seoul-listed shares have more than tripled this year, and SK Hynix crossed a $1 trillion market valuation in May, underscoring how dramatically its fortunes have shifted alongside AI demand.
Proceeds from the IPO will fund construction of the first fabrication plant at the company’s Yonging semiconductor cluster in South Korea, an advanced packaging plant in Cheongju, and purchases of manufacturing equipment.
The scale of this capacity investment is significant, because memory’s history is full of demand booms that ended precisely when new supply came online from prior waves of construction.
The economics driving investor enthusiasm are hard to ignore, particularly when looking at Micron (MU), the largest U.S. memory-chip maker and a close competitor to SK Hynix.
Micron reported fiscal third-quarter revenue of $41.5 billion for the period ended May 28, 2026, a figure representing approximately 350% growth year over year and up from $23.9 billion just one quarter earlier.
Management then guided for roughly $50 billion in revenue and a gross margin of approximately 86% in its fiscal fourth quarter, levels that were once unthinkable in a sector long defined by boom-and-bust cycles.
Micron also said its next-generation HBM4 memory is already in high-volume shipments for its lead customer, signaling that demand for the most advanced AI memory products is accelerating rather than slowing.
Despite those record results, Micron trades at only about 6 times forward earnings, a single-digit multiple that reflects the market’s longstanding skepticism that memory profits at this level can be sustained indefinitely.
The sequential growth rate is also stepping down, with Micron’s guidance implying roughly 21% quarter-over-quarter growth compared to 74% in its fiscal third quarter, though revenue continues to climb from record levels.
The record IPO raise confirms just how much capital is chasing AI memory exposure right now, but the billions raised will ultimately become new fabrication capacity, and memory markets have always been cyclical.
