Markets SKHY JUL 11, 2026

SK Hynix raises $26.5B in record US listing, jumps 13% on Nasdaq debut

The South Korean memory maker's ADRs priced at $149 and closed near $168 Friday, the biggest first-time US listing by a foreign company on record.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

SK Hynix Inc. raised $26.5 billion in its Nasdaq debut Friday, the largest first-time US listing by a foreign company on record, with American depositary receipts priced at $149 and closing near $168 for a roughly 13% first-day gain. The Seoul-based memory maker sold 177.9 million ADRs (each representing one-tenth of a common share) under the temporary ticker SKHYV, which converts to SKHY on Monday.

The book was covered roughly seven times over, according to Reuters reporting cited by Yahoo Finance. That kind of oversubscription is what happens when a global pool of capital wants direct exposure to the pick-and-shovel layer of the AI trade and can’t get enough of it on the Kospi. SK Hynix holds 56.4% of the high-bandwidth memory market per its SEC filing, and HBM is the component Nvidia’s accelerators can’t ship without.

Even so, the deal came in below the roughly $29 billion the company had initially telegraphed in an earlier regulatory filing. Pricing discipline, not weak demand.

The fundamentals behind the enthusiasm are legible enough. Annual revenue nearly tripled between 2023 and 2025 to about $65 billion, LSEG-polled analysts expect 2026 sales near $235 billion, and the Seoul-listed shares have risen more than sevenfold over the past year on persistent AI memory shortages. Market cap now hovers near $1 trillion. SK Hynix is also building a $4 billion advanced-packaging plant in West Lafayette, Indiana, expecting up to $458 million in CHIPS Act grants and as much as $570 million in federal loans, alongside a Solidigm expansion near Sacramento. The US listing is, among other things, a political document.

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won told Bloomberg Television the company could issue more US shares over time. “That actually requires a better return. Once we have a better return, then there’s more demand. The first thing we have to do is keep the stock price stable, and then hopefully in the long run we can have the upside potential.”

The broader tape barely noticed: the S&P 500 rose 0.4% and the Nasdaq 100 added 0.3%, capping a second straight weekly gain. Memory used to be the archetypal boom-and-bust cyclical. The bet embedded in Friday’s price is that AI has finally broken that cycle. Investors have made that bet before, in DRAM in 2000 and in fiber in 1999, and the cycle broke them instead.

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About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.