SEOUL — The money managers who back the world’s largest memory-chip maker are getting ready to buy a piece of it in dollars. SK Hynix will list American depositary receipts on Nasdaq on July 10, aiming to raise about 44 trillion won, roughly $29 billion, in what would be the largest U.S. listing ever by a foreign company. The offering surpasses the $25 billion Alibaba raised in its 2014 New York debut, and it tests how much appetite investors still have for the AI boom’s most expensive supply line.
The structure is straightforward: 10 ADRs will represent one common share, and SK Hynix will issue up to 17.79 million new shares, about 2.5% of its stock, under the ticker SKHY. The company trimmed the size from earlier plans to reflect a recent pullback in its share price, people familiar with the matter said, but the offering is still expected to be one of the largest equity raises of any kind this year. Four bulge-bracket banks are managing the sale.
Institutional demand has been strong. Baillie Gifford, the British asset manager, Coatue Management, and Situational Awareness Partners, an AI-focused hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, have signaled they are willing to buy up to $7 billion of the ADRs combined, according to people familiar with the discussions. The interest reflects both SK Hynix’s position as the dominant supplier of high-bandwidth memory to Nvidia and the broader shortage of ways for foreign investors to own pure exposure to the AI memory trade.
The proceeds are earmarked for the factory floor. SK Hynix said the money will fund fabs, advanced packaging lines for HBM, and purchases of extreme-ultraviolet lithography equipment, the most expensive tools in chipmaking. The company is in the middle of the largest capacity expansion in its history, including an 80 trillion won NAND plant in Cheongju announced last week, and it has said it will keep spending at record levels through 2027 to defend its lead in the memory market.
The numbers behind the listing explain the enthusiasm. SK Hynix posted revenue of 97.1 trillion won and operating profit of 42.9 trillion won last year, and in the first quarter of this year revenue reached 52.6 trillion won, roughly triple the year-earlier figure. Memory prices have risen for six consecutive quarters, and the company’s HBM output is sold out for the year. Analysts expect operating profit to keep climbing as long as AI data-center construction stays at current levels.
A Nasdaq listing gives SK Hynix something its Seoul shares never could: a place in the benchmarks that American index funds track. Once listed, the company becomes eligible for the Nasdaq-100, and the exchange-traded funds that track it would be forced to buy the stock as inclusion approaches. That prospect has driven much of the investor interest, since passive flows of that size can move a stock for months.
The listing also narrows a valuation gap that has frustrated SK Hynix executives. Micron, its closest American rival, trades on U.S. benchmarks with a following of U.S. analysts; SK Hynix has had to make do with Korean analysts and Korean index membership. A U.S. listing gives the company direct access to the analysts, investors, and index funds that have been bidding up American AI stocks, and management has made clear it intends to court them.
SK Hynix’s market position is the foundation of the offering. The company supplies the majority of the high-bandwidth memory used in Nvidia’s AI accelerators, a relationship that has made it the most important memory maker in the world’s most important technology cycle. Its HBM output is contracted well into the future, and the company has been selling every chip it can produce, which is why it is raising money now rather than waiting for a quieter market.
The listing also reshapes how the company’s shareholders are distributed. American investors have been buying SK Hynix through Korean brokers and foreign-exchange conversions; after July 10 they will be able to trade the stock on a U.S. exchange in dollars, with settlement cycles and disclosures that match the market where most of its customers and competitors are valued. The company will retain its primary listing in Seoul, and Korean regulators reviewed the conversion mechanics before clearing the dual structure.
Four bulge-bracket banks are managing the sale, which is expected to price in the days before the Nasdaq debut. A successful listing would cap a year in which SK Hynix’s market value more than tripled, and would hand the company a war chest for the capacity race that memory makers have entered.
The risks are the risks of the memory cycle itself. The offering prices SK Hynix at a moment when its stock has more than tripled from the 2024 trough, and the company is raising money to build factories that will not produce chips until 2027 and 2028. If AI demand holds, the new capacity will be full before it opens. If it does not, the industry’s history suggests the reverse. For now, investors are lining up to buy the ticket either way — at a price that assumes the boom has years to run.
