Solidigm, the NAND flash and SSD maker owned by SK Hynix, is raising 5 trillion to 10 trillion won in a pre-IPO funding round that values the company at about 50 trillion won, as it prepares for a Nasdaq listing, according to a report by CLS, the Chinese financial news service.
Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have been selected as lead underwriters for the round, which is being raised from global alternative asset managers, the report said. The structure, a private round ahead of a public listing, lets the company line up anchor investors and establish a valuation before it files. A representative for Solidigm declined to comment on the report.
Solidigm traces its history to Intel’s memory business. SK Hynix agreed in 2020 to buy Intel’s NAND flash and storage business for $9 billion, a deal that closed in stages and made the Korean company the world’s second-largest NAND supplier behind Samsung. The unit, renamed Solidigm, kept its U.S. base and Intel’s enterprise customers, and it has become one of the leading suppliers of the high-capacity SSDs that data centers buy by the pallet.
The timing reflects the state of the memory market. NAND prices, which collapsed in 2023 and recovered slowly, have been rising again as AI-driven demand for storage absorbed the industry’s excess capacity. The training of large models consumes enormous amounts of storage, and the data centers being built for AI inference need the fastest SSDs available. Solidigm’s focus on enterprise and data-center storage puts it in the middle of that demand, and its parent’s record profitability, driven by HBM sales, has made the memory business attractive to investors again.
The valuation, about 50 trillion won, roughly $36 billion at current exchange rates, would make Solidigm one of the largest memory companies to list in the United States. The company’s revenue is a fraction of its parent’s, but its growth rate, and the AI storage story, are what investors would be buying. The pre-IPO round, with its choice of underwriters and its targeting of alternative asset managers, is designed to test that appetite before the company commits to a public filing.
The listing would be the latest capital move in the SK Hynix system. The parent company has been the biggest winner of the HBM boom, with its stock rising sharply as Nvidia and other accelerator makers bought its memory, and a Solidigm IPO would extend the strategy: keep the crown jewel, HBM, inside the parent, and bring the NAND business, a different and more cyclical market, to public investors who want exposure to memory without the AI concentration risk. It would also give Solidigm a currency of its own for acquisitions, in a storage industry that has been consolidating.
Analysts said the deal will test how far the AI storage story can carry a listing. The data-center SSD market is real and growing, but it is competitive, with Samsung, Kioxia and Micron all fighting for share, and NAND remains one of the most cyclical businesses in technology. A successful round would set the stage for an IPO that ranks among the largest semiconductor listings of the year; a weak one would send SK Hynix back to the drawing board. For now, the choice of Morgan Stanley and Goldman, and the confidence to raise at a 50 trillion won valuation, suggests the parent believes the window is open.
The pre-IPO round is also a test of the market’s appetite for memory companies with AI exposure. Investors have spent two years deciding which parts of the AI supply chain deserve premium valuations, and storage has been an afterthought next to accelerators and HBM. Solidigm’s pitch is that the data being generated by AI, the training runs, the inference traffic, the backups, has to live somewhere, and that the companies building the highest-capacity SSDs will capture a share of the buildout that is only now being priced.
The choice of alternative asset managers as the round’s investors is notable. Private credit and buyout funds have become major sources of capital for companies preparing to list, and their presence in a pre-IPO round signals that the deal has been structured to attract long-term holders rather than the quick-flip funds that populate late-stage tech rounds. The structure also lets Solidigm set a valuation in private negotiations before testing the public market, a common pattern for semiconductor companies that want to avoid a volatile debut.
The outcome will be watched as a gauge of the memory cycle’s staying power. NAND is the most cyclical product in technology, and its price swings have broken companies that mistimed the cycle. Solidigm’s parent has navigated those swings for years, and the decision to bring the NAND business to public markets suggests SK Hynix believes the current upcycle has room to run. If the round prices at 50 trillion won and the IPO follows, the memory industry will have its first major U.S. listing in years; if the round stalls, it will be a warning that the AI storage story has not convinced the market.
