Ex-OpenAI Fund, Baillie Gifford Back SK Hynix $28B IPO
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- SK Hynix is selling $28bn in American depositary shares on Nasdaq this week, with trading set to start Friday in what would rank among the largest ever Asian-company listings in New York.
- Situational Awareness, the hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, and UK investor Baillie Gifford (along with Coatue) indicated they could take up to $7bn of the ADS.
- AI-driven memory demand pushed SK Hynix's 2025 revenue up 47% to Won 97.1tn ($63bn) while profit more than doubled to Won 42.9tn ($28bn), and Q1 2026 revenue nearly tripled year-on-year to Won 52.6tn ($34.5bn).
- SK Hynix's HBM business — the company is the primary supplier to Nvidia, claiming roughly half the global high-bandwidth memory market — has sent shares surging more than 750% on the Kospi over the past year to a Won 1,663tn ($1.1tn) market cap.
- SK Hynix and Samsung announced a $600bn plan to expand Korean manufacturing capacity last week, with the IPO proceeds earmarked for new fabs and EUV lithography scanners from ASML.
- SK Hynix will issue 17.79mn new shares (~2.5% of stock) priced off the Kospi at roughly $158 per ADS, led by underwriters Bank of America, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, while controlling shareholder SK Square retains more than 20%.
Why it matters: The $28bn raise from SK Hynix — Nvidia's primary HBM supplier with roughly half the global high-bandwidth memory market — gives the company fresh capital to fund Korean fabs and ASML EUV scanners needed to keep pace with explosive AI data-center demand, while exposing how both traditional investors like Baillie Gifford and AI-native funds like Situational Awareness are publicly committing to the memory-chip thesis at the same time.
