SK Hynix filed Monday to raise roughly $28 billion in a U.S. share sale, with the South Korean chipmaker’s stock expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SKHY this Friday. The filing sets up what could be the largest first-time share sale by a foreign company in Wall Street history, trailing only SpaceX’s $86 billion U.S. debut last month.
It also lands the company squarely in the middle of a live argument on Wall Street: whether the artificial intelligence trade that has driven SK Hynix’s Seoul-listed shares up 770% over the past 12 months still has room to climb, or is overdue for a reckoning.
According to the SEC filing submitted Monday, SK Hynix plans to offer 17.79 million American depositary shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. The company had originally targeted $29 billion when it first signaled the listing in late June; shares slumped in Seoul on Monday after the trimmed figure became public, even as demand for the offering had already exceeded the number of ADRs on sale, according to deal terms reported by Bloomberg and cited by Yahoo Finance. SK Hynix said the proceeds will fund capital spending on new production capacity in South Korea and the purchase of extreme ultraviolet lithography scanners, the machines used to etch the most advanced chips.
The numbers behind the listing explain the appetite. SK Hynix’s revenue climbed at an annualized rate of 198% in the first quarter of 2026, the filing shows, and the company has emerged as the top supplier of high-bandwidth memory, the chip type that has become a bottleneck for AI data centers. Its client list includes Nvidia, Google and Microsoft. Chief executive Kwak Noh-jung has told investors that demand for AI memory will likely keep the market tight through the end of the decade.
That growth has reshaped South Korea’s stock market along with SK Hynix’s own balance sheet. The KOSPI index is up 87% this year, and Samsung and SK Hynix now account for roughly half of the exchange’s total market capitalization between them. In a chartbook published July 3, Deutsche Bank put the concentration in stark terms:
“Samsung and SK Hynix helped the KOSPI triple over the past year after 17 years of doing nothing, even if some air has escaped from the balloon in recent days. Their combined market cap is still around 16 times that of the third largest company in the index.”
Deutsche Bank research note, July 3, 2026
That last line — “some air has escaped from the balloon” — is not an abstraction. Last month, offhand comments from SK Hynix suggesting it might slow its AI memory expansion triggered one of the KOSPI’s worst single-day plunges on record, by some measures its fifth-worst ever. Capital Economics senior markets economist James Reilly flagged the episode as a symptom rather than a blip.
“This volatility is, in our view, evidence of excessive froth and calls into the question the sustainability of this rally.”
James Reilly, senior markets economist, Capital Economics
Bank of America strategists have made a similar case in blunter terms, warning clients that speculation is hitting extreme levels as high multiple stocks have gapped up demonstrably, an event that has historically preceded a valuation “snapback”
— part of the argument behind the bank’s year-end S&P 500 target of 7,100, roughly 5% below where the index closed last week.
For a company this large, the IPO is also a stress test of its own. SK Hynix’s Nasdaq listing won’t match SpaceX’s scale, but the comparison is instructive: SpaceX shares jumped in their first sessions after last month’s debut, then fell sharply and are now trading back near their first-day close, while bonds the company issued soon after its IPO have already slipped to levels more typical of junk-rated borrowers despite carrying investment-grade ratings. Investors weighing whether to chase SK Hynix’s debut this week are, in effect, betting on whether that pattern repeats — or whether a company selling the physical memory chips AI actually runs on deserves a different verdict than the AI ventures selling the promise of it.
SK Hynix’s rally has outpaced even its closest rival: Micron Technology’s stock is up about 700% over the same 12-month stretch, a run that has already reshaped how Apple and other device makers plan their chip supply chains. Both companies now sit at the center of an AI buildout that has lifted rivals too — Samsung’s own chip profits jumped 1,800% this quarter on the same wave of AI memory demand. The open question, for SK Hynix’s new Nasdaq shareholders starting Friday, is whether the market financing that buildout is due for a correction of its own.
