Memory Giant SK hynix's $28B Nasdaq Listing — an IPO Betting on AI's Lifeblood

On July 10, Korean memory giant SK hynix will list on the Nasdaq via ADR, issuing 17.79 million shares to raise about $28 billion. This is not only the largest overseas company IPO in US stock market history, but also the most direct capitalization of the AI storage super-cycle.

💡 What You Will Learn

On July 10, Korean memory giant SK hynix will list on the Nasdaq via ADR, issuing 17.79 million shares to raise about $28 billion. This is not only the largest overseas company IPO in US stock market

The cash cow is going public. How profitable is SK hynix now? In Q1 2026 revenue reached 52.58 trillion won (about $35.5 billion), up a staggering 198% year over year; operating profit hit 37.61 trillion won (about $25.4 billion), up 405% YoY. Its operating margin of 72% is 14 percentage points higher than TSMC's 58% over the same period — a manufacturing company earning software-company margins.

HBM (high-bandwidth memory) is a money printer. SK hynix holds a 57% share of the global HBM market and took 70% of the HBM4 orders for NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform. NVIDIA alone accounts for 27% of its revenue. In 2025 HBM revenue grew more than 200% YoY, and 2026 capacity is fully sold out. The stock has risen nearly 800% in a year, pushing market cap past $1 trillion — yet its forward P/E is only 6.2x, cheaper than Micron's 7x.

Why Nasdaq, and not just for money: this $28 billion raise ranks second only to SpaceX's $85.7 billion and ahead of Saudi Aramco ($25.6B) and Alibaba ($25B) — the largest overseas IPO in US history. Of the three memory giants, Micron is on the Nasdaq and Samsung is in Korea; only SK hynix was on neither. Ordinary US investors could barely buy its stock — OTC trading was illiquid and it consistently underperformed its Korean-listed shares. After this listing it could be added to the Nasdaq-100 index; just the QQQ fund tracking that index ($482 billion in AUM) would create systematic buying. There's also valuation arbitrage: TSMC's ADR has traded at a 13% premium over its Taiwan shares for a long time, peaking above 21%. SK hynix follows the same logic — US investors will pay a higher premium for a pure-play AI name.

All the proceeds go into expansion — Yongin semiconductor park (9.4 trillion won), Cheongju advanced packaging plant (19 trillion won), Indiana packaging plant (5.9 trillion won) — a total investment plan of 100 trillion won (about $75 billion), all staked on AI memory.

Behind the boom, the losses of three years ago loom. The storage industry is never gentle. Three years ago SK hynix lost nearly 10 trillion won — a record single-year loss for a Korean company. Three years later it has transformed into one of the world's most profitable chip companies. Yet the core drivers of this bull run — Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta — increasingly lean on debt and equity financing to fund data-center spending. If AI capital expenditure slows, the entire storage industry's profit logic faces a fundamental shift. Last week Meta reportedly planned to lease idle compute, and memory chip stocks crashed collectively, with Micron down nearly 10% in a single day.