SK Hynix debuts on Nasdaq with $26.5B IPO, raising capital for HBM manufacturing expansions

SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in the largest foreign company IPO in U.S. history, completing its Nasdaq debut on July 10, 2026. The South Korean memory giant sold 177.9 million American depositary receipts (ADRs) at $149 apiece under ticker SKHYV (regular trading as SKHY begins Monday). The offering was more than seven times oversubscribed with demand from over 500 investment firms, with major anchors including Baillie Gifford, Coatue Management, and Situational Awareness Partners signaling combined interest in up to $7 billion of stock.

SK Hynix is the world's leading maker of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the vertically stacked DRAM critical for AI accelerators. The company plans to use IPO proceeds to boost AI-memory manufacturing capacity, with confirmed build-outs including a first-phase fab at the Yongin semiconductor cluster, a new advanced-packaging line in Cheongju, and EUV lithography equipment arriving by year-end 2027. The company is also constructing its first U.S. advanced-packaging plant in West Lafayette, Indiana for $4 billion, eligible for $458 million in CHIPS Act grants and $570 million in federal loans, targeted for completion around 2028.

SK Hynix's explosive growth reflects the AI infrastructure boom: the company is on track to post over 200 trillion won ($133 billion) in operating profit this year and has already sold out its entire 2026 output of HBM, DRAM, and NAND, with the crunch expected to extend into 2027. The company's Seoul-listed stock is up roughly 220% year-to-date and has climbed more than sixfold over the past year, recently surpassing Samsung briefly as South Korea's most valuable company.

For AI infrastructure architects, SK Hynix's IPO signals accelerating capacity constraints and validates HBM bottleneck severity—the company's sold-out 2026-2027 production becomes a critical constraint for anyone designing new AI training clusters. This is also a market signal: large institutional capital is now flowing into memory supply, signaling confidence that AI data center capex will remain elevated.