Catenaa, Friday, July 10, 2026- SK Hynix jumped over 15% on its US market debut on Friday, climbing past $172 from its $149 offer price.
The company raised $26.5 billion in its Wall Street debut, marking the biggest first-time listing by a foreign company in the US.
The initial public offering (IPO) consists of 177.9 million American depositary receipts (ADRs), each representing one-tenth of a share of the company’s common stock, or 17.79 million shares. Demand for the US sale was running at seven times the available shares, per reports from Reuters.
The South Korean memory chip leader said Thursday that it had sold the ADRs at $149 each ahead of its US public trading debut on Friday.
They are trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SKHYV on Friday, before entering regular trading under SKHY beginning Monday.
Memory makers are flying high thanks to the seemingly insatiable demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and storage chips, which has created a global shortage impacting everything from data center builders to the consumer electronics industry.
All totaled, the $26.5 billion raised means the SK Hynix debut tops Alibaba’s US IPO, per Bloomberg data.
A key supplier to Nvidia, SK Hynix is seeking to build up its manufacturing capacity to keep up with the incredible need for memory and storage chips driven by the global AI build-out.
The debut also gives US investors an easier way to get in on the South Korean memory stock bonanza.
The company’s South Korea-listed stock, which trades on the Korea Exchange, has skyrocketed 174% over the past six months and 634% in the past year.
Data center servers require storage chips to save and access data needed to run AI models and processes. But AI chips, like Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), don’t need to access every bit of program or AI model all the time. Doing so would make them slow and inefficient.
It would be like trying to remember everything that’s happened in your life when someone asks what you did over the weekend.
That’s where HBM comes in. This specialized memory holds the most important data needed to run a piece of software, right next to the processor, enabling superfast performance.
Three major companies make HBM and storage: Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix. And according to SK Hynix’s filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, it’s the latest producer of HBM, capturing 56.4% of the market. All three companies are Nvidia partners.
But American investors have limited means to purchase shares of SK Hynix or Samsung via US markets.
As it stands, that dearth of memory and storage chips could last into 2030, because setting up new manufacturing facilities takes years.
But the memory industry is also prone to periods of booms and busts.
During its recent earnings call, Micron announced that it is signing customers to long-term strategic customer agreements, in which clients commit to purchasing a specified quantity of Micron’s chips each year over the course of the contract, with a large up-front cash payment.
Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana told Yahoo Finance at the time that most of those agreements run for five years, whereas prior memory agreements lasted just one year.
