SK Hynix launches $28 billion Nasdaq listing, the second-largest ever

SK Hynix, South Korea's largest memory chipmaker, priced its Nasdaq American Depositary Receipt offering this week ahead of a July 10 trading debut under the ticker SKHY, in a deal that raises approximately $28 billion and ranks as the second-largest stock listing ever recorded globally.

Deal structure and size

The offering consists of 17.79 million new ADRs, each representing one-tenth of a common share, with a reference price set at 242,500 won per underlying share using SK Hynix's July 3 Seoul closing price — translating to roughly $166 per ADR at prevailing exchange rates. Four banks are serving as global coordinators on the deal: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase, joined by nine additional financial institutions.

Why SK Hynix is raising capital now

The company is directing proceeds toward building new fabrication plants and buying advanced manufacturing equipment, including extreme ultraviolet lithography scanners from ASML — the Dutch firm that holds a global monopoly on the machines required to print the smallest, most advanced chip features. Those scanners cost hundreds of millions of dollars each and have multi-year order backlogs, making early, large capital commitments necessary for any chipmaker planning to expand leading-edge capacity.

Specifically, SK Hynix is funding its Yongin Cluster in South Korea, a large new campus of fabrication plants set to begin coming online in 2027, alongside a $4 billion packaging plant in Indiana — the company's first US manufacturing investment.

The AI memory bottleneck driving demand

SK Hynix's timing reflects its position at the center of the AI buildout's most acute supply constraint: high-bandwidth memory, the specialized chip stacks that feed data to AI accelerators like Nvidia's GPUs. The company holds a 56.4% share of the global HBM market by revenue, and roughly 29.1% of the broader DRAM market including HBM, as of the first quarter of 2026.

That dominance has coincided with sustained memory shortages that have pushed prices sharply higher across the industry throughout 2026, a dynamic serious enough that Apple raised prices on MacBooks and iPads by as much as 20% in June, citing DRAM and LPDDR cost increases tied to AI-driven demand.

Tapping US investor demand directly

Listing directly on Nasdaq, rather than relying solely on its existing Korea Exchange listing, lets SK Hynix access US investor capital more directly — a strategy similar to the approach Taiwan's TSMC has used to attract foreign investment flows into advanced semiconductor manufacturing. The move also aligns with a South Korean government-led initiative reported at roughly $880 billion aimed at expanding the country's domestic semiconductor investment and manufacturing base.

What to watch

With pricing set and trading beginning July 10, the immediate signal to watch is where SKHY opens relative to its roughly $166 reference price — a strong debut would validate investor appetite for direct exposure to AI memory supply constraints, while a weak one would suggest the memory shortage narrative is already fully priced into SK Hynix's existing Korea Exchange shares. Longer term, the capital raised is earmarked for capacity that won't come online until 2027, meaning today's investors are betting the HBM shortage persists for at least that long.