SK Hynix’s American Depositary Receipts will begin trading on the Nasdaq on Friday in the largest-ever US listing by a foreign company, as investor demand for the South Korean chipmaker’s high-bandwidth memory business continued to build.
The ADRs were priced at $149 per share, raising $26.5 billion, and the offering was oversubscribed seven times.
SK Hynix’s chips are a key component in the infrastructure powering AI data centers.
The New York debut follows a sharp rally in SK Hynix’s shares on the Korean exchange, where the company’s market capitalization surpassed $1 trillion in May and its stock price has more than tripled this year, as technology companies have committed hundreds of billions of dollars toward AI infrastructure.
Proceeds from the US share sale will go toward expanding SK Hynix’s manufacturing capacity, including the construction of new fabrication plants and the purchase of lithography equipment from ASML.
“That is exactly the kind of story equity investors want to own into earnings season,” said Patrick Munnelly, partner for market strategy at Tickmill Group. “Not abstract AI enthusiasm, but capital raising, capacity expansion, data center demand, and hardware bottlenecks.”
Munnelly added that the recent pullback has created a cleaner entry point for investors who believe earnings will validate the capex cycle.
“SK Hynix’s ADR debut in the US will be strong. Very strong,” said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote.
“Today, SK Hynix may provide an early answer to my earlier question: how much additional value can the company extract from the US market, given that its share price in South Korea has already risen by more than 1,700% in little over a year?”
The listing sets an early benchmark for how much room foreign AI-linked chipmakers still have to run in US markets, with SK Hynix’s performance likely to shape investor appetite for similar cross-border listings in the sector.