SK Hynix Raises $26.5 Billion in Nasdaq's Largest Foreign IPO

SK Hynix debuted on New York's Nasdaq exchange on July 10, 2026, raising $26.5 billion through an offering of American depositary receipts. It is the largest initial public offering by a foreign company in US market history, surpassing the record previously held by Alibaba since 2014.

The company sold investors 177.9 million depositary receipts at $149 each, with ten ADRs corresponding to one ordinary share listed on the Seoul exchange. Trading began Friday under the temporary ticker SKHYV, with the stock set to trade under its permanent ticker, SKHY, starting Monday.

Beating Alibaba's Record

The previous record for the largest US IPO by a foreign company belonged to Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which raised $25 billion in 2014. SK Hynix's debut also surpassed Saudi Aramco's 2019 offering, making it one of the biggest market events in recent years tied directly to the AI infrastructure boom.

Investor interest was exceptionally strong. Orders for the shares exceeded the offered pool sevenfold, with total bids reaching roughly $171.5 billion. The stock climbed several percentage points above its offering price on its first day of trading.

Why HBM Memory Matters

SK Hynix makes HBM, the ultra-fast memory chips mounted alongside graphics processors in servers used to train and run large language models. The company controls 56.4 percent of that market, ahead of Samsung and Micron, with Nvidia as its main customer. HBM shortages have for months limited how quickly companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta can expand data centers for training AI models.

The Seoul-listed company's valuation topped $1 trillion as early as May 2026. Over the past six months its share price rose 174 percent, and 634 percent over the past year. Even so, SK Hynix has for years traded at a lower valuation than its US rival Micron despite comparable financial results, a gap analysts call the "Korea discount."

Listing on the US market, where large-cap global tech companies are concentrated, will allow major institutional investors to more rationally assess our company's value - Kwak Noh-Jung, CEO of SK Hynix

The strong demand for this offering shows that global appetite for AI infrastructure remains intact despite recent market volatility - Jung In Yun, CEO of Fibonacci Asset Management Global

Where the Money Goes

SK Hynix said the proceeds will fund expanded production capacity in South Korea, including the first phase of a plant in the Yongin cluster, a new P&T7 advanced chip packaging line in Cheongju, and the purchase of EUV lithography scanners expected to arrive at its facilities by the end of next year. It is a direct response to the memory production shortage that has constrained the growth of AI infrastructure worldwide for the past two years.

SK Hynix's revenue nearly tripled between 2023 and 2025, reaching about $65 billion, while net profit doubled to roughly $28 billion in 2025. The scale of that growth reflects how much demand for AI server memory has transformed an industry where margins were cyclical and unstable just a few years ago.

What This Means for the Market

SK Hynix's Nasdaq debut signals that US investors want direct access to companies at the source of the AI supply chain, not just those building models or applications. For Polish investors and tech companies, it offers a new benchmark for gauging how long the current AI infrastructure investment cycle can run, given that a key memory supplier is posting record orders despite high prices.

Not everyone is optimistic. Some analysts compare the current situation to earlier memory market supercycles that ended in sharp price crashes after periods of euphoria. Until any cooling in AI chip demand materializes, though, SK Hynix remains one of the few manufacturers able to meet orders from companies like Nvidia, OpenAI, and Microsoft.

Sources: CNBC (cnbc.com), Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com), 24/7 Wall St. (247wallst.com), Yahoo Finance (finance.yahoo.com)