SK Hynix priced its Nasdaq debut at $149 a share, raising $26.5 billion in the largest US listing ever by a company based outside the country.
If you wanted a piece of SK Hynix before this week, you couldn't get one without opening a Korean brokerage account. That changed on Thursday, when the world's dominant supplier of high bandwidth memory chips priced its American depositary shares at $149 each, raising $26.5 billion and topping Alibaba's 2014 offering as the biggest first-time US share sale by a foreign company on record.
The size alone tells you how badly Wall Street wanted in. SK Hynix sold 177.9 million ADS, each representing one-tenth of a common share that already trades in Seoul, and the order book came in more than seven times oversubscribed. According to the Asia Business Daily, demand from institutional investors, including sovereign wealth funds and technology focused funds, approached $200 billion against the deal's term sheet.
Trading opened Friday under the temporary ticker SKHYV on a when issued basis, with the stock set to convert to its permanent symbol, SKHY, on Monday. Bloomberg reported the offering as the second biggest IPO in US market history, trailing only SpaceX's roughly $85.7 billion raise.
Wall Street didn't wait for the US ticker to start bidding the stock up. SK Hynix shares climbed 5.3% in Seoul trading on Thursday alone, and CNBC noted the stock had surged more than 8% intraday earlier in the week as pricing news spread. Momentum like that ahead of a debut usually means a pop on day one. It also means anyone buying SKHY on Monday is chasing a stock that's already run hard.
None of this happens without Nvidia. SK Hynix controls roughly half to two thirds of the global market for high bandwidth memory, the stacked chip that sits next to graphics processors and feeds them data fast enough to keep pace with AI training runs. It was the first company to move HBM4 into mass production, and UBS has estimated SK Hynix could capture around 70% of the HBM4 supply for Nvidia's upcoming Rubin platform. Micron and Samsung are still catching up.
The company's own numbers back up the hype. SK Hynix reported first quarter 2026 revenue of 52.58 trillion won, up 198% from a year earlier, driven largely by HBM shipments to data center customers. Its market capitalization crossed $1 trillion in May, according to Euronews, making it only the second memory chipmaker, after Micron, to hit that mark this year.
Frankly, the Nasdaq listing was never really about raising cash SK Hynix couldn't get elsewhere. It's about building new fabs and packaging lines fast enough to keep up with orders it already has, and doing it with dollars instead of won.
A Template for Asian Chipmakers, With Limits
The obvious question is who follows. Samsung Electronics has given no indication it plans a similar US listing, and there's no evidence yet that it needs one. Its balance sheet doesn't require the same capital push, and it's still chasing SK Hynix on HBM4 qualification with Nvidia rather than racing to raise money in New York. China's CXMT is a different story: the Seoul Economic Daily reported the company is nearing its own IPO, though analysts still expect it to list domestically rather than in New York, and its HBM3E based products remain a generation behind SK Hynix's.
What SK Hynix has actually proven is narrower than
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