SK Hynix Pops 13% in a Record $26.5 Billion Nasdaq Debut

SK Hynix, the South Korean chipmaker that dominates the high-bandwidth memory sitting alongside Nvidia’s AI processors, made a loud entrance on Wall Street. Its stock began trading on the Nasdaq on Friday under the ticker SKHY, listed initially as SKHYV, and jumped about 13% on its first day to close near $168. The debut came through American depositary receipts priced at $149 each, raising $26.5 billion, which makes it the largest US share sale ever completed by a foreign company, nudging past the $25 billion Alibaba raised when it listed in 2014.

MarketWatch had called the stock primed for a pop, and the logic behind that was the so-called Korea discount. SK Hynix’s Seoul-listed shares have long traded at a lower price-to-earnings multiple than US rival Micron, even though its fundamentals are comparable and, as the leader in HBM with roughly 57% of that market, arguably stronger. A Nasdaq listing hands international investors a direct route into the world’s top HBM producer for the first time, which one Janus Henderson manager said “fills a genuine gap,” and could help narrow that valuation gap over time. The numbers give the case some weight: revenue nearly tripled between 2023 and 2025 to about $65 billion, more than three-quarters of it from memory, and the company crossed a $1 trillion market value for the first time in May. Proceeds from the sale are earmarked for expanding its Korean factories and buying extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines to protect its lead.

The bigger picture is that SK Hynix is the purest large-cap way to own the AI-memory boom, and a record-setting listing of this size says a lot about how central HBM has become to the whole AI build-out. The debut folds two bets into one: that demand for the memory stacked next to Nvidia’s chips keeps climbing, which the chairman underlined by telling CNBC that “demand is enormous,” and that a US listing can re-rate a company the Korean market kept cheap. The 13% pop vindicated the primed-for-a-pop call, but the durability question is real. Memory is a famously cyclical business, and the same worries about the payoff on AI spending that battered chip stocks only days earlier have not disappeared. For now, though, a discounted global leader has just given investors outside Korea a clean way to own the picks and shovels of the AI era.