Meet SK Hynix, the trillion-dollar South Korean chipmaker debuting on U.S. markets
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- SK Hynix is slated to begin trading on the Nasdaq on Friday under ticker SKHY (initially SKHYV), raising around $29 billion via ADRs to fund new factories and equipment, according to a regulatory filing.
- SK Hynix has a market cap of about $1 trillion after a more than sevenfold increase in its stock price over the past year, making it the second most valuable company in South Korea behind only Samsung.
- SK Hynix leads the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) market that goes into Nvidia AI chips, with analysts projecting it will capture more than half the market this year; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited SK Hynix in June to announce a multiyear partnership.
- SK Hynix is building a $4 billion advanced packaging plant in West Lafayette, Indiana — its first U.S. production facility, scheduled for completion in 2028 — eligible for up to $458 million in CHIPS Act funding and up to $570 million in Commerce Department loans.
- SK Hynix plans to spend up to $720 billion on South Korean expansion, including a $390 billion Yongin fab cluster whose four-fab completion timeline has been accelerated by more than a decade to 2033, plus roughly $7.8 billion on ASML EUV machines by end of 2027.
- SK Hynix's annual revenue nearly tripled from 2023 to 2025 to about $65 billion, with analysts polled by LSEG projecting it to more than triple again to roughly $235 billion in 2026, even as the whole memory industry faces soaring prices and shortages that companies say won't ease until at least 2027.
- Analyst Daniel Newman of Futurum Group warned that 'this is how memory always acts in any megacycle… it always crashes hard,' noting SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung are now using long-term contracts to lock in prices years ahead in an attempt to manage the cycle.
Why it matters: The listing gives U.S. investors their first direct access to the company analysts say will capture more than half the HBM market powering Nvidia's AI systems — but at a roughly $1 trillion valuation built on a historically cyclical commodity business. SK Hynix is betting $720 billion in South Korean capex and a new Indiana packaging plant that AI memory demand won't ease until at least 2027, a call that could either cement its dominance or leave it overexposed if the cycle turns.
