SK Hynix raises $26.5B in largest foreign IPO on Nasdaq debut

SK Hynix completed its US IPO on July 10, raising $26.5 billion at $149 per American Depositary Receipt (ADR), marking the largest first-time foreign listing in US history and surpassing Alibaba's 2014 IPO. The South Korean memory chipmaker sold 177.9 million ADRs (17.79 million shares) with institutional demand running 7x oversubscribed, reflecting appetite for exposure to AI-driven memory constraints. The company will trade under ticker SKHY beginning Monday.

SK Hynix controls 56.4% of the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) market, a critical chokepoint for GPU makers like Nvidia. The company's Q1 2026 revenue surged 198% year-over-year; its stock has climbed 273% in 2026 in Seoul. Proceeds fund new manufacturing capacity in South Korea and chipmaking equipment including extreme ultraviolet scanners from ASML, as the company and rival Samsung invest $550 billion collectively to expand fab footprint and alleviate AI memory shortages expected to persist through 2030.

For AI architects: HBM supply remains the binding constraint on data-center expansion. SK Hynix's massive capital raise signals incumbents are prioritizing long-lead-time capacity buildout over shareholder returns, but yields and cycle timing remain execution risks. The US listing opens exposure for dollar-based portfolio managers but underscores that AI compute scaling is now bottlenecked on memory die yield and fab floor time, not GPU silicon.