The company that supplies the memory inside every high-end Nvidia GPU is about to become one of the most closely watched names on the Nasdaq. On July 6, SK Hynix began marketing an American depositary receipt offering targeting roughly $28 billion in fresh capital, launching one of the largest chip listings in the history of the public markets and giving US investors direct access to the single most supply-constrained component of the AI buildout: high-bandwidth memory.
The South Korean firm, already listed in Seoul under ticker 000660, set terms for the ADR sale to price the week of July 9 and to begin trading around July 10 under the ticker SKHY. Roughly 17.8 million shares are on offer, with each common share represented by 10 ADRs at a reference price near $166. Early indications suggest the deal has already drawn more than $7 billion of anchor interest from a handful of large institutions, and the company has floated a raise as high as $29.4 billion depending on final pricing and the exercise of any over-allotment.
Why memory is the new bottleneck
For most of the AI era, the scarce resource was the GPU. That framing is now outdated. A modern Nvidia accelerator is useless without the stacks of high-bandwidth memory bolted alongside its logic die, and SK Hynix makes more of that memory than anyone else on earth. The company holds roughly 57 percent of the HBM market as of the first quarter of 2026, and its HBM3E is designed into every production Blackwell GPU Nvidia has shipped this year. HBM is effectively sold out through 2026.
The financial results reflect that leverage. SK Hynix reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of 52.58 trillion won, about $35.5 billion, up 198 percent year over year and 60 percent from the prior quarter — the first time the company has cleared 50 trillion won in a single quarter. HBM revenue alone surpassed $10 billion in the first half of the year. The stock in Seoul has climbed more than 260 percent since the start of 2026, a run that management is now trying to translate into a richer valuation on a US exchange.
"Listing in the U.S. market, where global large-cap tech companies congregate, will allow major institutional investors to reassess the company's value more reasonably," CEO Kwak Noh-jung said at the listing press conference, making explicit the argument that a Seoul-only listing has left the company undervalued relative to its American AI-infrastructure peers.
That thesis is partly about who buys the shares. "Passive investment funds now account for a larger proportion of global capital flows than active funds, with a significant concentration of that capital in Nasdaq-listed securities," said Kim Sun-woo, a senior analyst at BofA Securities, noting that index inclusion on a US venue can pull in structural demand a Korean listing never reaches.
Riding the hyperscaler capex wave
The demand side of SK Hynix's story is the trillion-dollar capital-spending race among the largest cloud and model builders. Microsoft is guiding to roughly $190 billion in AI-oriented capex, Alphabet to something in the $180 billion to $190 billion range, while Amazon pushes its custom Trainium silicon and SpaceX expands its Colossus supercomputing effort. Every one of those data-center dollars eventually needs memory bandwidth, and HBM is the choke point. Analysts project the HBM total addressable market could approach $100 billion by 2028.
SK Hynix intends to spend the proceeds defending that lead. The company has earmarked the roughly $28 billion for capital expenditures — new fabrication capacity at its Yongin cluster and Cheongju advanced-packaging lines, plus acquisition of the EUV lithography scanners needed to keep pace with next-generation designs. In June it shipped 12-layer HBM4E samples aimed at Nvidia's Rubin Ultra platform, and UBS expects SK Hynix to capture close to 70 percent of the HBM4 market that will feed Nvidia's Rubin generation.
The offering is not without risk for buyers. A listing this large, priced into an AI trade that has already run hard, is in effect a market-wide referendum on whether investor appetite for AI infrastructure names still has room to run. Memory has historically been one of the most brutally cyclical corners of the semiconductor industry, prone to sharp price collapses when supply catches up with demand. Bears will argue that a company minting record profits at the top of a supercycle is choosing an opportune, rather than a cheap, moment to sell equity.
What to watch next
Three things over the coming days and weeks. First, final pricing: whether the deal clears near the top of its range around $29 billion or settles closer to $28 billion will signal how much conviction institutions still hold in the AI memory trade. Second, the aftermarket: SKHY's first days of trading will be read as a proxy for the health of the entire AI-hardware complex, from Nvidia down. Third, HBM4 execution: SK Hynix's ability to hit yield and volume targets on the memory destined for Rubin is the real determinant of whether this valuation is justified — or whether the memory supercycle, like every cycle before it, eventually turns.
Sources
- [Memory Chipmaker SK Hynix Kicks Off $28 Billion US Listing — Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-06/memory-chipmaker-sk-hynix-starts-marketing-us-listing) - [Korea-listed memory chip giant SK hynix sets terms for $28.1 billion US IPO — Renaissance Capital](https://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPO-Center/News/120281/Korea-listed-memory-chip-giant-SK-hynix-sets-terms-for-$28.1-billion-US-IPO) - [Memory chip maker SK hynix seeks to raise $28B through US IPO — SiliconANGLE](https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/06/memory-chip-maker-sk-hynix-seeks-raise-28b-u-s-ipo/) - [SK Hynix: $29 billion stock offering going live this week will test investors' appetite for AI stocks — Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/07/06/sk-hynix-ipo-stock-offer-nasdaq-29-billion-ai/) - [SK Hynix Set to List on Nasdaq: Complete Analysis of the $29 Billion IPO — Odaily](https://www.odaily.news/en/post/5211758)
"Listing in the U.S. market, where global large-cap tech companies congregate, will allow major institutional investors to reassess the company's value more reasonably."— Kwak Noh-jung, CEO, SK Hynix