SK Hynix rises 13% in Nasdaq debut. Chairman tells CNBC 'demand is enormous'
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- SK Hynix rose 13% in its Nasdaq debut, closing at $168.01 under ticker SKHYV (switching to SKHY Tuesday), with ADRs priced at $149 and the offering raising $26.5 billion for expansion plans.
- SK Hynix Chairman Chey Tae-won told CNBC that demand is 'enormous, exponentially' and that even after announcing plans to double capacity within five years, every customer told him that's 'not enough, man' and they need more.
- SK Hynix trails only Samsung by market cap in South Korea and counts Nvidia and Apple among its customers, making it the leader in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used inside AI chips.
- SK Hynix's valuation has risen more than sevenfold over the past year amid a shortage in computer memory driven by AI infrastructure demand.
- SK Hynix announced a $4 billion advanced packaging plant in Indiana, but the vast majority of its planned expansion — a $390 billion cluster of chip fabrication plants — will take place in Yongin, South Korea.
- Tae-won argued AI demand, including AI agents and physical AI robots, has permanently changed memory demand from past boom-bust cycles, even as the source notes the historical pattern of memory oversupply and price collapse after big tech shifts.
Why it matters: The $26.5 billion raise funds a $390 billion Yongin fabrication cluster and a $4 billion Indiana packaging plant, a bet that AI-driven HBM demand has permanently broken from the memory industry's boom-bust past. Day-one investors buying in at the $149 ADR price effectively endorsed that thesis, locking in capital at a sevenfold higher valuation despite the sector's history of oversupply collapses after tech booms.
