South Korea’s SK Hynix raises $26.5bn in record-breaking US IPO

South Korean chip giant SK Hynix has raised a record-breaking $26.5bn ahead of its Wall Street debut amid soaring demand for semiconductor chips driven by the AI boom.

SK Hynix said on Friday that it had sold 177.9 million American depositary shares (ADS) at $149 each ahead of its listing on the New York-based Nasdaq stock exchange.

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ADS are US dollar-denominated 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) marks the largest-ever listing by a foreign company in the US, surpassing Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s $25bn debut in 2014.

The listing also ranks as the second-largest globally, after SpaceX’s record-breaking $85.7bn Nasdaq listing in June.

Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that the listing was more than seven times oversubscribed.

Dilin Wu, a research strategist at Pepperstone in Melbourne, Australia, said the market reception had exceeded “even the most optimistic expectations”.

“Seven times oversubscribed, about $171bn in orders for a $24-28bn deal, and this happened while the semiconductor sector was actively selling off and the Kospi was in a circuit breaker week,” Wu told Al Jazeera, referring to South Korea’s benchmark stock market index.

“I think the SK Hynix ADR pricing says one thing very clearly: the AI memory cycle is real, the earnings are real, and global capital has simply never had easy access to the best pure memory play in the space,” Wu said.

SK Hynix has racked up record-breaking profits on the back of furious demand for its advanced memory chips, with net income hitting 40.34 trillion won ($26.6bn) in the first quarter of 2026.

SK Hynix’s shares on the South Korean stock exchange have soared about 229 percent since the start of the year.

In May, the chip behemoth joined the elite club of companies worth at least $1 trillion alongside rival chipmakers Samsung Electronics and the US-based Micron Technology.

SK Hynix and Samsung both signed on to a $1 trillion AI investment initiative announced by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung late last month, pledging to invest $518bn with suppliers to build two chipmaking facilities.

SK Hynix’s South Korea-listed shares were up about 0.8 percent as of 06:30 GMT on Friday.

“Clearly there’s huge amounts of capital chasing the AI opportunity,” Cameron Robertson, a portfolio manager at Platinum Asset Management in Sydney, Australia, told Al Jazeera.

“Investors around the world are scrambling to find ways to profit from it. I think what we are seeing is a mix of genuine confidence and speculative activity.”

Alex Holmes, regional director for Asia Pacific at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said SK Hynix had benefitted from a shift in investor sentiment towards companies in the semiconductor supply chain amid concerns about the sustainability of the multibillion-dollar AI budgets of tech 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 relative to the benchmark S&P 500 index, according to Morgan Stanley.

“Within tech, the [Magnificent Seven] have underperformed, and growth has instead concentrated in the semiconductor supply chain. In the US that’s firms like Micron … In Asia, SK Hynix and Samsung have been big winners,” Holmes told Al Jazeera.

SK Hynix’s stellar run has mirrored a broader AI-driven rally in South Korea’s stock market, which is up more than 70 percent so far in 2026.

“Korea has absolutely been swept up in the excitement over the past year – you can see that in the rapid growth in margin lending in the country, the rise in popularity of single stock levered ETFs, and retail participation in the stock market,” Platinum Asset Management’s Robertson said.

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