SK Hynix raises $26.5B in the biggest foreign IPO in US history

SK Hynix sold 177.9 million American depositary shares (ADRs) at $149 each, priced so U.S. investors could buy in at roughly a tenth of the cost of a full share in Seoul. The offering topped Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO in 2014 to become the largest-ever U.S. debut by a non-American company.

The company began trading on the Nasdaq on Friday, July 10, under the temporary ticker SKHYV; regular trading opens Monday, July 13, when the ticker becomes SKHY. U.S. investors have moved in quickly — the stock opened 14% above its IPO price and kept rising in early trading. That’s despite SK Hynix pricing its U.S. shares at a 2.7% premium to their own three-day average in Seoul, according to its Korea Stock Exchange filing. Demand for the offering was reportedly more than seven times the available shares, per media reports — notable given Korean companies have historically traded at a discount to global peers, a gap often attributed to complex corporate governance, low shareholder returns, regulatory uncertainty, and geopolitical risk tied to North Korea.

SK Hynix makes memory chips, including high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a key component of the GPUs used in AI systems; Nvidia relies on SK Hynix as one of its primary suppliers. Per its filing, proceeds will fund a new fab in South Korea to address a worldwide AI-driven memory shortage, a new packaging facility, and EUV scanners used to manufacture next-generation chips.

The listing lands as U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick pushes Korean chipmakers to build capacity on American soil. Visiting a Micron event on Thursday, Lutnick reportedly said he’s already in talks with Samsung and SK Hynix about new U.S. factories, aiming to prevent South Korea from continuing to dominate the sector. Micron, for its part, has announced plans to invest $250 billion in new U.S. manufacturing, a commitment it says will create more than 90,000 jobs. The push comes even as Samsung and SK Hynix have separately pledged more than $550 billion for new manufacturing investment inside South Korea.

Why it matters

SK Hynix’s blockbuster U.S. listing shows global investors betting heavily on AI’s memory-chip supply chain, even as Washington presses the same Korean suppliers to shift some of that capacity onto American soil.