HBM market leader SK Hynix plans a U.S. stock exchange listing, alongside a $29.4 billion financing wave.
SK Hynix Inc., one of the world's three largest memory chip manufacturers headquartered in South Korea and the market leader in high-bandwidth memory (HBM), has filed an amended Form F-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to list its shares for trading on the Nasdaq stock market. The company plans to list its American Depositary Shares under the ticker symbol "SKHY." Each ADS represents an undisclosed fraction of the company's ordinary shares traded on the Korea Exchange (KRX) KOSPI market, with each ordinary share having a par value of KRW 5,000.
According to the latest filing, the company's board of directors resolved on June 24 that the maximum number of newly issued ordinary shares related to this offering will be 17.79 million, representing approximately 2.50% of the total outstanding ordinary shares of approximately 712.702 million as of the resolution date.
SK Hynix intends to use the net proceeds from this offering toward its KRW 45.5 trillion capital expenditure plan for building major new memory chip production capacity in South Korea. The company also plans to allocate funds for the purchase of expensive extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment, which is expected to cost approximately KRW 11.9 trillion, with bulk deliveries anticipated by December 2027. Additional required expenditures are expected to be financed through cash flows from operating activities, existing and future credit facilities, borrowings under debt securities, and other financing resources.
Wall Street financial giants including Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan will serve as global coordinators for this large-scale IPO. The company expects its shares to begin trading on the U.S. market on July 10 and aims to raise KRW 45.45 trillion (approximately USD 29.4 billion) through this listing.
Based on the proposed fundraising and issuance size, SK Hynix's ADS offering would rank among the top three largest initial public offerings in global equity market history, rivaling Saudi Aramco's record-breaking USD 29.4 billion IPO in 2019, though falling short of SpaceX's unprecedented fundraising of at least USD 75 billion, which remains the largest IPO globally.
SK Hynix is the core supplier of high-bandwidth memory systems to leading AI chipmakers such as NVIDIA. This U.S. listing marks a significant milestone in the company's ascent. After becoming NVIDIA's preferred HBM supplier—effectively the dominant player in AI chips globally—it has emerged as the world's largest supplier by HBM market share. This position enabled it to temporarily surpass its long-standing domestic rival, Samsung Electronics, both in market capitalization and overall DRAM market share.
This American Depositary Receipt offering follows a surge of approximately 850% in SK Hynix's share price on the Seoul stock exchange over the past 12 months, which propelled its market capitalization above USD 1 trillion, briefly overtaking Samsung Electronics as South Korea's most valuable company. Investor sentiment toward semiconductor firms tied to the AI infrastructure boom has recently been volatile, with increasingly crowded positions and growing leveraged strategies contributing to sharp two-way swings amid the stock's overall upward trajectory year-to-date.
SK Hynix's listing plan has drawn a flood of capital, further amplified by the exceptionally robust earnings and outlook recently reported by U.S. memory giant Micron Technology, which significantly exceeded expectations. These developments underscore that the current memory supercycle is far from over and has evolved from a traditional PC and smartphone-driven cycle into a structurally scarce, AI data center-led supercycle. Micron validates the robustness of real demand, while SK Hynix demonstrates intense capital market enthusiasm, highlighting investors' continued willingness to pay substantial premiums for exposure to memory chip supply constraints.
The grand investment narrative driving global capital flows this year—"seeking silicon-based inflation while de-emphasizing carbon-based assets"—reflects a shift of capital away from carbon-based assets tied to linear economic growth and reliant on demographics, resources, and traditional sectors such as manufacturing, automotive, consumer goods, real estate, and energy, toward high-end manufacturing chains centered on silicon wafers and underpinning AI computing infrastructure.
In the AI era, the scarcest resources are no longer traditional labor, real estate, or general production and manufacturing capacity, but rather "silicon-based means of production"—including GPUs and ASICs, HBM and DRAM and NAND memory chips, data center CPU components, high-performance Ethernet infrastructure, advanced packaging capacity, cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing equipment such as EUV lithography tools, power infrastructure for data centers, and optical interconnects within data centers.
The strategic significance of SK Hynix's U.S. listing may extend beyond fundraising—it aims to reposition the HBM market leader from the valuation discount framework typically applied to Korean cyclical stocks toward the U.S. pricing paradigm for AI computing infrastructure assets. As a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory for AI systems developed by NVIDIA, Google, and others, SK Hynix could see its Korean-listed shares undergo upward repricing if it achieves valuation multiples in the U.S. market comparable to those of peers like Micron.