SK Hynix Lands on Nasdaq: ~$28B ADR Offering Oversubscribed 7x, All on the Back of AI Memory HBM

The world's leader in AI memory is about to ring the bell on the US market, with demand hot enough to oversubscribe the book seven times over.

Three Key Takeaways

SK Hynix's US ADR offering priced on July 9 and debuts on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on Friday, July 10, under the ticker SKHY. The sale targets roughly $28.2 billion across 177.9 million ADRs, with ten ADRs representing one common share; at the Seoul closing price it works out to about $25.7 billion. By either measure, it's one of the largest US listings in years.

Demand ran hot — more than 7x oversubscribed. Three cornerstone investors — Baillie Gifford, Coatue, and Situational Awareness Partners — collectively signaled appetite for up to $7 billion, and the book also drew sovereign wealth funds, tech-dedicated funds, and Asia-focused global money. The heavy demand had the pre-pricing book stuffed full.

What underpins all of it is AI memory, HBM. SK Hynix holds about 57% of global high-bandwidth memory (HBM) revenue and is the primary supplier for Nvidia's AI accelerators. The proceeds go toward expanding Korean capacity and buying EUV lithography scanners — in plain terms, cranking out more of the memory that feeds AI chips.

WangDou's Take

A Korean memory maker with an ADR sale oversubscribed 7x and cornerstones committing $7 billion in one shot — unthinkable two years ago, back when memory was the poster child of brutal cyclicality, up one year and down two. What changed isn't SK Hynix; it's who's standing next to it: Nvidia. Every H100, every GB200 needs a stack of HBM to run, and only two companies on Earth — it and Samsung — can pile HBM a dozen-plus layers high and still hold yield. So SK Hynix went from the cabbage-cheap memory shop to the guy selling drill bits at the stall next door — in the AI gold rush, Nvidia sells the shovels, and it sells the bits that go on them. The 7x-oversubscribed money nominally goes to EUV scanners and more fabs, but the real risk hides right there: HBM's fat margins are bet on a single customer's appetite. The day AI capex hits the brakes (semis just had a panic selloff over exactly that last week), this ~$28 billion valuation gets repriced. The louder Friday's bell rings, the more you should watch who's buying at the top.

Source: Bloomberg · Reuters/Yahoo · IBTimes