SK Hynix sets record Nasdaq debut amid AI boom test

SK Hynix raised about $26.5 billion after pricing 177.9 million American depositary receipts at $149 each, then started trading on Nasdaq in the largest U.S. share sale ever by a foreign company. The South Korean chipmaker’s debut on Friday eclipsed Alibaba’s 2014 New York listing and gave Wall Street a front-row seat to the latest fight over AI infrastructure.

The offering was more than seven times oversubscribed, underscoring how much capital still wants exposure to the companies feeding artificial intelligence data centers. SK Hynix said the U.S. listing would broaden its access to American investors, who had only limited ways to buy the company through U.S. markets before the deal.

The timing made the debut a referendum on the durability of the AI boom. Semiconductor stocks have pulled back recently, and SK Hynix’s market entrance arrived as investors reassessed whether demand for chips tied to graphics processors and cloud buildouts can justify the sector’s recent valuations. That tension was especially sharp for a company that spent roughly 14 years leaning into high-bandwidth memory, a bet that was once mocked inside the industry and is now central to the AI supply chain.

High-bandwidth memory has turned SK Hynix into one of the most sought-after suppliers to AI data centers and a key partner to Nvidia, whose systems depend on faster memory to move data through increasingly power-hungry workloads. Samsung Electronics remains the world’s largest memory chipmaker by volume, but SK Hynix’s rise has narrowed the gap in the most coveted corner of the market, where AI demand has reshaped the competitive map.

The scale of the listing also matters beyond one company’s balance sheet. A foreign chipmaker choosing Nasdaq for a record-setting sale shows how U.S. capital markets have become a strategic hub for the global semiconductor race, where access to American investors, AI customers and the deepest pool of risk capital can reinforce industrial advantage. For Seoul-based SK Hynix, the deal was both a financing event and a declaration that the contest for memory chips now runs through New York as much as through fabs in Asia.