SK Hynix officially began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SKHYV, completing the largest U.S. IPO ever by a foreign company. The South Korean memory chip giant raised $26.5 billion after pricing its American depositary shares at $149, with the stock opening around 15% higher near $180 as investors rushed into one of the year’s most anticipated semiconductor listings.
The offering attracted extraordinary demand. Investor orders reportedly approached $200 billion, making the IPO more than seven times oversubscribed. Nearly half of the shares were allocated to the ten largest institutional investors, highlighting exceptionally strong conviction among professional money managers in the long-term growth of artificial intelligence infrastructure and memory semiconductors.
The $26.5 billion transaction surpassed Alibaba’s historic $25 billion U.S. listing to become the largest IPO ever completed by a foreign company in the United States. It now ranks as the second-largest IPO overall in U.S. history, trailing only SpaceX’s $75 billion Nasdaq debut earlier this year.
SK Hynix has emerged as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global AI boom. The company currently controls approximately 56.4% of the global market for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the specialized memory used in NVIDIA’s AI accelerators and many of the world’s most advanced AI servers. As hyperscale cloud providers continue investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure, demand for HBM chips has significantly outpaced supply, driving record profitability across the memory industry.
The proceeds from the offering will primarily be used to expand semiconductor manufacturing capacity in South Korea and purchase additional extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment, enabling the company to accelerate production of next-generation AI memory chips. Management expects these investments to strengthen SK Hynix’s leadership position as AI workloads become increasingly memory-intensive.
The successful debut also reinforces investor appetite for companies directly exposed to AI infrastructure. While software firms continue competing to commercialize generative AI applications, semiconductor manufacturers supplying the underlying hardware have become some of the market’s strongest performers. SK Hynix joins NVIDIA, Broadcom, and other chipmakers that have benefited from unprecedented spending on AI data centers worldwide.
Investors will now watch whether SK Hynix can maintain its technological lead as competitors accelerate HBM production. With AI investment expected to remain elevated for years, the company enters the public U.S. market from a position of considerable strength, supported by dominant market share, robust demand, and one of the largest IPOs ever completed.
