SK hynix Opens at $170 on Nasdaq, Up 14% From IPO Price

[Financial News, New York = Reporter Lee Byung-chul]SK hynix, which has entered Nasdaq, opened at $170 in its first day of trading, about 14% above its IPO price of $149, underscoring global investors' expectations for the AI memory market. The surge in demand for high-bandwidth memory, driven by rising AI investment from NVIDIA and other Big Tech companies, has drawn U.S. capital to South Korea's leading AI semiconductor maker, analysts said.
In an interview after the listing on the 10th local time, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won emphasized the significance of entering the U.S. stock market, saying, "It was a kind of dream, and now it's a dream come true."
Chey said semiconductor demand in the AI era is growing much faster than the company had expected. "Whenever I meet customers and partners, everyone wants more semiconductors," he said. "SK hynix announced plans to double production capacity within the next five years, but customers say, 'That is not enough. We need more volume.'"
This suggests that memory supply is still failing to keep up with demand as competition to invest in AI data centers expands faster than expected. Market watchers say the shortage centered on HBM is likely to continue for some time.
Through this American Depositary Receipt (ADR) offering, SK hynix raised about $26.5 billion. The company plans to use the funds to build new semiconductor plants and expand advanced production facilities.
SK hynix is currently the market leader in the HBM segment used in NVIDIA's AI accelerators. HBM is a next-generation memory that stacks multiple DRAM chips vertically to greatly increase data processing speed, and it is considered a core component of AI servers and AI accelerators. As AI investment expands and HBM prices rise, SK hynix's market value has increased more than sevenfold over the past year.
The company is also expanding its U.S. investment. It plans to invest $4 billion in Indiana to build an advanced packaging plant, where some HBM products will undergo back-end processing. Still, the center of its capacity expansion remains in South Korea.


[email protected] Reporter Lee Byung-chul Reporter