SK Hynix priced its US listing on Friday to raise $26.5bn, turning investor appetite for AI infrastructure into one of the biggest stock sales on record, the Guardian reports. The chipmaker is selling about 18 million Nasdaq-listed depositary shares at $149 each after the deal was reportedly more than seven times oversubscribed.
The memory specialist has become one of the clearest financial winners from the datacenter build-out because it supplies high-bandwidth memory used alongside Nvidia accelerators in AI servers. Guardian reporting says the sale tops Saudi Aramco’s 2019 debut and Alibaba’s New York IPO, though it still trails SpaceX’s enormous June float. SK Hynix says the money will help fund a first fab at a new semiconductor cluster in Yongin and an advanced packaging facility in Cheongju. Its Seoul-listed shares have jumped more than 220% this year, and the company’s Kospi market value pushed past $1tn in May.
Analysis
Capital markets are now rewarding whichever supplier sits closest to the GPU bottleneck. SK Hynix wins because memory has stopped being a side component and become strategic leverage; rivals that can’t match HBM volume or packaging scale will get squeezed over the next year.
