SK Hynix Surges 14% in $26.5B Nasdaq Debut
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- SK Hynix ADRs opened at $170 after pricing at $149 — a 2.7% premium to its three-day Seoul average — in the second-largest US share sale after SpaceX's $857B IPO last month, with the deal more than seven times oversubscribed.
- SK Hynix, the world's biggest maker of high-bandwidth memory chips used in Nvidia and AMD AI GPUs, has seen shares pull back 25% from a record high two weeks ago but remain up roughly 630% over the past year.
- SK Hynix trades at about 5.8 times forward earnings versus US rival Micron at roughly 7 times, with analysts saying the Nasdaq listing should expand its investor base and help close that valuation gap.
- SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won told Bloomberg TV the company plans to develop 5 gigawatts of AI data center capacity outside South Korea and is open to additional US investment, including a potential memory-as-a-service offering.
- Micron, SK Hynix's main HBM competitor, has rallied about 711% over the past 12 months as AI-driven demand turned advanced memory into a scarce commodity.
- Bank of America analysts expect global cloud and AI infrastructure capital expenditure to approach $1.5 trillion by 2027, a 40% to 50% jump year-over-year, though Renaissance Capital's Matt Kennedy flagged oversupply concerns as inherent to the industry.
Why it matters: SK Hynix's oversubscribed $26.5B listing and 14% first-day pop suggest the AI-memory trade still has institutional appetite despite a 25% pullback from record highs, while giving the chipmaker a US stock that trades at roughly 5.8x forward earnings — well below Micron's ~7x — a gap the debut is designed to narrow.
