SK Hynix U.S. share sale draws strong demand on AI boom
SK Hynix's U.S. share sale was more than seven times oversubscribed as AI investors chased the memory-chip supplier behind Nvidia's systems.
Investor demand for SK Hynix’s planned U.S. share sale ran to more than seven times the shares available, a striking sign that capital is still chasing the parts of the AI stack that sit far from the chatbot front end. The South Korean memory-chip maker launched the deal on July 6 to raise 43 trillion won, or about $28.07 billion, through American depositary receipts, with 17.79 million new shares on offer and 10 ADRs representing one common share.
The sale is being priced off a reference level of 242,500 won per ADR, based on SK Hynix’s July 3 close in Seoul, even after the stock had climbed about 260% this year. Early indications of interest reached as much as $7 billion from Baillie Gifford Overseas, Coatue Management and Situational Awareness Partners, with demand coming from long-only funds, technology-focused investors, sovereign wealth funds and Asia-focused buyers. The listing would give SK Hynix a larger and more permanent foothold in the deepest capital market in the world at a time when memory, not just chips in general, has become one of the tightest bottlenecks in the AI buildout.
That bottleneck is centered on high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, the component that feeds data to graphics processors used to train and run large models. Market research cited by CNBC puts SK Hynix at about 60% of the HBM market, a dominant position that has made it one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI surge and one of its most critical suppliers. The company also hopes the U.S. listing will narrow a valuation gap with Micron, which already enjoys easier access to American investors and broader coverage from U.S. funds.
SK Hynix plans to start trading on Nasdaq on July 10 and says the move will broaden its investor base and help its “true corporate value” be properly evaluated. The company is also building the Yongin Cluster in South Korea, which is set to begin coming online in 2027, and a $4 billion packaging plant in Indiana, its first manufacturing site in the United States. The new share sale comes against a wider policy push in South Korea, where the government has unveiled a $576 billion chip investment program in the southwest of the country.
The deal also fits into a deeper industrial alignment with Nvidia. On June 7, Nvidia and SK Hynix announced a multiyear technology partnership to co-develop next-generation memory for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin AI supercomputers and other platforms, with Jensen Huang calling SK Hynix an “extraordinary partner” and saying advanced memory is essential to AI factories. With demand already far above supply, the offering suggests investors are not just buying into a single chipmaker, but into the memory layer that is keeping the AI boom running.
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