Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The South Korean giant has made the largest stock exchange ever by a foreign company in the US, surpassing Alibaba’s 2014 IPO.
South Korean giant SK Hynix has raised $26.5bn ahead of Wall Street amid growing demand for semiconductors used in AI.
SK Hynix said on Friday it sold 177.9 million American shares (ADS) at $149 each ahead of its listing on the Nasdaq market in New York.
Recommended Articles
list of 4 itemsend of series
ADS are US dollar shares of a foreign company that can be bought and sold on the US market.
SK Hynix’s 177.9 million ADSs are equivalent to 18 million ordinary shares.
SK Hynix’s initial public offering (IPO) becomes the largest foreign company listing in the US, surpassing Chinese giant Alibaba’s $25bn in 2014.
The listing is also the second largest in the world, after SpaceX’s record breaking $85.7bn Nasdaq listing in June.
Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, said the listings were rewritten more than seven times.
Dilin Wu, an analyst at Pepperstone in Melbourne, Australia, said the market’s reception exceeded “even the best expectations”.
“Seven times they registered, about $171bn on orders of $24-28bn, and this happened when the semiconductor sector was selling fast and the Kospi had a chaotic week,” Wu told Al Jazeera, referring to the South Korean stock market index.
“I think SK Hynix ADR prices say one thing very clearly: AI’s memory is real, its earnings are real, and the global capital has never had the chance to play better,” Wu said.
SK Hynix has achieved record profits on the back of aggressive demand for memory chips, with total revenue hitting 40.34 trillion ($26.6bn) in the first quarter of 2026.
Shares of SK Hynix on the South Korean stock market have risen nearly 229 percent since the start of the year.
In May, the chip behemoth entered into an elite $1 trillion deal with equipment makers Samsung Electronics and US-based Micron Technology.
SK Hynix and Samsung both signed up to a $1 trillion AI investment announced by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung late last month, pledging to spend $518bn with suppliers to build two chip factories.
Shares in South Korea’s SK Hynix were up about 0.8 percent as of 06:30 GMT on Friday.
“Obviously there’s a lot of money chasing the AI opportunity,” Cameron Robertson, director of operations at Platinum Asset Management in Sydney, Australia, told Al Jazeera.
“Investors around the world are trying to find ways to make a profit.
Alex Holmes, head of the Asia Pacific region at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said SK Hynix benefited from a shift in business thinking to companies in the semiconductor industry while worrying about the sustainability of the AI budgets of multibillion-dollar technology giants such as Amazon and Microsoft.
The “Magnificent Seven” – Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Apple and Tesla – traded at their lowest levels in a decade this week compared to the S&P 500 index, according to Morgan Stanley.
“Within technology, the (Magnificent Seven) have not done well, and the growth has been concentrated in the electronics industry. In the US where there are companies like Micron… In Asia, SK Hynix and Samsung have been very successful,” Holmes told Al Jazeera.
SK Hynix’s strong run has marked the biggest AI-driven rally in South Korea’s stock market, which is up 70 percent year-to-date in 2026.
“Korea was absolutely swept up in excitement in the last year – you can see the rapid growth of lending margins in the country, the rise in popularity of single stock leveraged ETFs, and participation in the market,” Platinum Asset Management’s Robertson said.
