{"slug": "sk-hynix-seeks-ai-premium-with-nasdaq-listing", "title": "SK hynix seeks AI premium with Nasdaq listing", "summary": "SK hynix, the leading supplier of high-bandwidth memory to Nvidia, is planning a Nasdaq listing as soon as August, aiming to join Wall Street's AI winners and potentially raise up to $14 billion. The South Korean chipmaker filed confidentially with the SEC in March and has hired major banks to manage the offering, seeking a premium valuation from US investors who view memory chips as a scarce AI input rather than a commodity.", "body_md": "HBM leader aims to join Wall Street's AI winners, though offering size and timing remain under review\n\nSK hynix could float shares on the Nasdaq as soon as August, a move that would rank among the largest US listings in years and put one of the most important names in the artificial intelligence supply chain in front of American investors for the first time.\n\nThe South Korean chipmaker, the main supplier of high-bandwidth memory to Nvidia, filed confidentially with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in March and has lined up Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America to manage the offering.\n\nReuters reported the August timeline this month. The company has said only that it intends to list in 2026.\n\nAn American depositary receipt lets US investors buy a foreign company's stock in dollars. For SK hynix, the appeal is less the dollars than the company they would be investing in. On the Nasdaq it would trade on the same screens as Micron, its closest US-listed peer, and be priced by investors who treat memory chips as the scarce input for AI rather than a commodity that swings with the cycle.\n\nThat is the rerating SK hynix is after, and the market is already moving. On Monday, the stock carried SK hynix past Samsung Electronics to become Korea's most valuable listed company, a first in a run of dominance Samsung had held since around 2000.\n\n\"Once the receipts start trading, funds that hold Micron will move in right away, and the stock should reprice sharply,\" said Kim Sun-woo, an analyst at Meritz Securities who expects a listing in August once the SEC signs off.\n\nHow much the offering raises is the open question, and the estimates do not agree. Reuters has put the figure at up to roughly $14 billion, based on a sale of about 2 to 3 percent of shares. Korean outlets have floated as much as 40 trillion won ($26 billion), a number inflated by this year's rally in the stock.\n\nThose figures describe very different deals, and SK hynix is waving the market off both. A company official said the 40 trillion won is an outside estimate built by the media and brokerages, not a figure the company has set. Approval is not a fixed-date event either.\n\n\"The SEC doesn't grant clearance on a set day. We go back and forth on comments until they have no more questions, so the timing is hard to pin down,\" the official said.\n\nThe terms that matter most surface last, after book-building sets the per-share price the day before the listing.\n\nThat gap matters because of how the money would be raised. Creating the receipts through new shares dilutes existing holders, and not everyone in Seoul is sold on it. When the plan surfaced, the Korea Corporate Governance Forum opposed a new-share issue, arguing the company throws off enough cash to fund the listing through buybacks instead.\n\nThe fresh capital would feed an expansion already under way. SK hynix posted a record operating profit of 37.6 trillion won in the first quarter and on June 17 shipped samples of its 12-layer HBM4E chips to major customers, and it is pouring some 31 trillion won into the first plant at its new Yongin chip cluster south of Seoul. High-bandwidth memory has become the bottleneck in building AI accelerators, and the industry expects the shortage to persist.\n\nThe near-term read on whether that holds comes Wednesday, when Micron reports earnings that investors treat as a gauge of how much momentum the AI chip rally has left.\n\nmjh@heraldcorp.com", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sk-hynix-seeks-ai-premium-with-nasdaq-listing", "canonical_source": "https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10784001", "published_at": "2026-06-22 05:32:58+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-22 05:44:08.366203+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-chips", "ai-infrastructure", "ai-startups"], "entities": ["SK hynix", "Nvidia", "Nasdaq", "SEC", "Citigroup", "JPMorgan", "Goldman Sachs", "Bank of America"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sk-hynix-seeks-ai-premium-with-nasdaq-listing", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sk-hynix-seeks-ai-premium-with-nasdaq-listing.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sk-hynix-seeks-ai-premium-with-nasdaq-listing.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sk-hynix-seeks-ai-premium-with-nasdaq-listing.jsonld"}}