SK Hynix’s $26.5 billion US listing powers the AI IPO wave

SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion with its US listing, and the third-quarter IPO market owes it a thank-you note.

A record-setting debut on Nasdaq

SK Hynix completed its US offering of American depositary receipts on July 10, 2026. An ADR is essentially a US-traded stand-in for a foreign company’s shares. American investors can buy it without dealing with an overseas exchange.

The company sold 177.9 million ADRs at $149 apiece, bringing in $26.51 billion. That total topped Alibaba’s 2014 record for the largest US listing by a foreign company.

Demand was not a problem. The offering was more than seven times oversubscribed, meaning investors asked for well over seven times the shares on offer.

Cornerstone investors showed interest in up to roughly $7 billion of the offering. Baillie Gifford and Coatue Management were among them.

Trading on day one reflected that appetite. The ADRs opened around $170, a jump of approximately 14% from the offer price, and reached intraday highs near $177. Across the session, the gains landed in a range of 14% to 17%.

At listing, the company’s market capitalization sat around $1.1 trillion. SK Hynix shares in Seoul had already pushed its market value past $1 trillion earlier in 2026.

Why investors lined up for memory chips

The draw here is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. HBM stacks memory chips vertically and places them close to the processor, moving huge volumes of data quickly, which is exactly what training and running large AI models demands.

SK Hynix held approximately 56% of the global HBM market as of the first quarter of 2026. It supplies memory chips to Nvidia and Microsoft for their AI chips.

The company plans to use the proceeds mainly to build new fabrication and packaging facilities in South Korea. It also intends to buy advanced equipment, including EUV scanners, the precision tools that determine how advanced a chipmaker’s products can be.

One deal, one busy quarter

US IPOs raised $36.1 billion in the third quarter of 2026, excluding special purpose acquisition companies. SK Hynix accounted for the lion’s share of that sum on its own.

The quarter ranked as the second-busiest for US IPOs since 2021. Smaller IPOs have struggled for traction, even as the biggest names drew crowds.