The South Korean memory chipmaker's Nasdaq debut drew roughly $196 billion in demand, making it one of the largest foreign share sales in US history
When $196 billion in investor demand shows up for a $28 billion offering, you don’t need a crystal ball to read the market’s mood. SK Hynix, the South Korean memory chip giant that makes the high-bandwidth memory powering NVIDIA’s AI GPUs, just pulled off one of the largest foreign share sales in US history, and Wall Street practically tripped over itself trying to get a piece.
Inside the deal #
The offering involved 17.79 million common shares structured as 177.9 million ADRs at a 10:1 ratio. Cornerstone investors, including Baillie Gifford Overseas, Coatue Management, and Situational Awareness Partners, indicated interest of up to $7 billion collectively.
SK Hynix’s shares have climbed roughly 260% year-to-date.
The marketing campaign kicked off around July 6-7, 2026, with pricing expected shortly after and trading set to begin around July 10-11.
Proceeds from the offering are earmarked for expanding production capacity and purchasing advanced ASML EUV lithography equipment.
Why AI infrastructure is the new gold rush #
SK Hynix manufactures high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, the specialized chips that sit inside NVIDIA’s data center GPUs and allow them to process the massive datasets that power large language models and other AI workloads. SK Hynix is one of only three companies in the world capable of producing HBM at scale, alongside Samsung and Micron.
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