SK Hynix, a South Korean chip maker, has raised $26.5bn in its New York share offering. The company sold 177.9 million American depositary shares for $149 each.
SK Hynix is a key supplier to Nvidia, an AI chip giant. The shares are set to begin trading on the Nasdaq on Friday. The company’s market value topped $1tn in South Korea in May, lifted by the boom in demand for AI chips.
SK Hynix’s share price has more than tripled in South Korea this year. This has helped boost the benchmark Kospi index by over 70% in the same period, along with Samsung Electronics. SK Hynix is one of the world’s leading memory chip makers.
The industry has been given a major boost by the hundreds of billions being spent on AI. Shares in rivals Samsung Electronics and Micron have more than doubled in recent months. According to Seoul National University finance professor Jaewon Choi, the US listing gives SK Hynix easier access to investment from the world’s biggest economy.
Choi said traders are closely watching the listing as a “yardstick to test the water” for whether investor enthusiasm for memory chip makers will continue. The AI boom has triggered a rush of companies raising money on the stock market, including GrokAI owner SpaceX, which raised $85.7bn in June.
AI developers Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing to go public, with valuations of over $1tn. SK Hynix’s listing is the largest ever by a foreign firm in the US, according to CNBC, which reported the story.
