SK하이닉스, 역대 최대 규모인 265억 달러 미국 IPO 성공

South Korean chip giant SK Hynix has raised a record-breaking $26.5 billion ahead of its Wall Street debut amid soaring demand for semiconductors used in artificial intelligence.

SK Hynix sold 177.9 million American depositary shares (ADS) at $149 each ahead of its listing on Nasdaq. The ADS, which are US dollar-denominated shares of a foreign company tradable on the US market, represent 18 million ordinary shares.

SK Hynix's initial public offering marks the largest-ever listing by a foreign company in the United States, surpassing Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba's $25 billion debut in 2014. Globally, the offering ranks as the second-largest, after SpaceX's record-breaking $85.7 billion Nasdaq listing in June.

Bloomberg reported that the listing was more than seven times oversubscribed. Dilin Wu, a research strategist at Pepperstone in Melbourne, Australia, told Al Jazeera that the market reception had exceeded "even the most optimistic expectations." Wu noted the offering received approximately $171 billion in orders for a $24–28 billion deal "while the semiconductor sector was actively selling off and the Kospi was in a circuit breaker week."

"I think the SK Hynix ADR pricing says one thing very clearly: the AI memory cycle is real, the earnings are real, and global capital has simply never had easy access to the best pure memory play in the space," Wu said.

SK Hynix has achieved record-breaking profits on the back of furious demand for its advanced memory chips, with net income hitting 40.34 trillion won ($26.6 billion) in the first quarter of 2026. The company's shares on the South Korean stock exchange have soared approximately 229 percent since the start of the year. In May, SK Hynix joined the elite club of companies valued at $1 trillion or more, alongside rival chipmakers Samsung Electronics and US-based Micron Technology.

SK Hynix and Samsung both signed on to a $1 trillion AI investment initiative announced by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung late last month, pledging to invest $518 billion with suppliers to build two chipmaking facilities.

Cameron Robertson, a portfolio manager at Platinum Asset Management in Sydney, told Al Jazeera: "Clearly there's huge amounts of capital chasing the AI opportunity. Investors around the world are scrambling to find ways to profit from it. I think what we are seeing is a mix of genuine confidence and speculative activity."

Alex Holmes, regional director for Asia Pacific at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said SK Hynix had benefited from a shift in investor sentiment towards companies in the semiconductor supply chain, amid concerns about the sustainability of multibillion-dollar AI budgets at tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft. The "Magnificent Seven" – Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Tesla – traded at their lowest levels in a decade this week relative to the S&P 500 index, according to Morgan Stanley.

"Within tech, the Magnificent Seven have underperformed, and growth has instead concentrated in the semiconductor supply chain," Holmes told Al Jazeera. "In the US that's firms like Micron. In Asia, SK Hynix and Samsung have been big winners."

SK Hynix's stellar run has mirrored a broader AI-driven rally in South Korea's stock market, which is up more than 70 percent so far in 2026. Robertson noted that "Korea has absolutely been swept up in the excitement over the past year – you can see that in the rapid growth in margin lending in the country, the rise in popularity of single stock levered ETFs, and retail participation in the stock market."