US Investors Can Finally Buy Into SK Hynix Ahead of Its Nasdaq Debut

SK Hynix is listing American depositary shares on the Nasdaq under ticker SKHY, giving U.S. investors direct access to the dominant HBM chipmaker. The $28.1 billion offering, the largest-ever U.S. stock sale by a foreign company, is set to price July 9 and begin trading July 10. The listing opens SK Hynix to American capital markets and potential index inclusion, capitalizing on its 58% share of the HBM market driven by AI demand.

SK Hynix is about to let American investors buy into the world's dominant HBM chipmaker directly, without a Korean brokerage account, currency conversion or a 3 a.m. wake-up call to catch Seoul trading hours. If you've wanted a piece of the company supplying the memory chips that make Nvidia's AI GPUs work, you've been stuck. SK Hynix has traded only in Seoul, and the workaround for US investors, thin over-the-counter ADRs, was illiquid and clunky. That changes this week. SK Hynix filed a Form F-1 with the SEC to list American depositary shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker SKHY, and as TechCrunch reported on July 6, the listing gives retail and smaller institutional investors a real entry point into a stock that's been almost entirely a Korean story until now. Here's how it actually works. Each ADR is worth a tenth of one common share. Using SK Hynix's July 3 closing price in Seoul as the benchmark, the filing set a reference price of 242,500 won per ADR, or roughly $174. Pricing is expected Thursday, July 9, with shares set to begin trading Friday, July 10. Once that happens, buying SKHY works exactly like buying any other Nasdaq stock: you search the ticker in your regular US brokerage account, place an order in dollars, and it settles through normal US infrastructure. No Korean paperwork, no won. The scale here is hard to overstate. SK Hynix is targeting roughly 43 trillion won, about $28.1 billion, according to CNBC, which would make it the largest-ever initial US stock sale by a foreign company, surpassing the IPO records set by Alibaba and Saudi Aramco. BofA Securities, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan are running the deal as global lead coordinators. Demand isn't theoretical either. Baillie Gifford Overseas, along with funds managed by Coatue Management and Situational Awareness Partners, have separately indicated interest in buying up to a combined $7 billion of the offering. Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, told TechCrunch that it's individuals and smaller institutions who stand to benefit most from the US listing, not the large investors who already have ways into the stock. For SK Hynix, that's the point. The company gets direct access to a new pool of momentum-driven American capital, and a US listing also opens the door to eventual inclusion in major equity indexes, which would bring automatic buying from passive ETFs that track them. Why does a memory chipmaker warrant a $28 billion Wall Street debut in the first place? Look at the numbers. SK Hynix's stock is up about 260% so far this year in Seoul, and its first-quarter revenue climbed nearly 200% year over year. That's the AI infrastructure boom showing up directly in a balance sheet. SK Hynix supplies the high-bandwidth memory, HBM, that sits next to Nvidia's GPUs and feeds them data fast enough to keep them from stalling. According to Counterpoint Research data cited in coverage of the listing, SK Hynix held 58% of the global HBM market in the first quarter of 2026, with Samsung and Micron tied for second at roughly 21% each. That lead isn't unchallenged. All three companies have now cleared Nvidia's qualification process and begun production of HBM4, the next-generation memory for Nvidia's upcoming Vera Rubin platform, something Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed in early June. Samsung has been especially aggressive, moving into HBM4 mass production in February and, according to a Yahoo Finance report from late June, positioning itself to reclaim share as its chips clear customer qualification. SK Hynix's real edge is timing: it delivered HBM4 samples to customers nearly a year before Samsung did, and in a market where qualification cycles run long, that head start matters more than a market-share percentage point here or there. None of that guarantees a smooth landing on Nasdaq. A $28 billion deal is enormous by any measure, and pricing it into a market already jittery about AI-chip valuations carries its own risk, something TheStreet flagged in its own preview of the listing. But for US investors who've watched SK Hynix's chart from the outside for years, Friday is the first time they'll be able to just buy it. Also read: Syntiant files to go public just as Wall Street starts doubting the AI chip boom https://startupfortune.com/syntiant-files-to-go-public-just-as-wall-street-starts-doubting-the-ai-chip-boom/ • Samsung's Record Quarter Just Undercut the AI Spending Skeptics https://startupfortune.com/samsungs-record-quarter-just-undercut-the-ai-spending-skeptics/ • CISA Is Using Anthropic's Mythos to Audit Government Code Despite the Ban https://startupfortune.com/cisa-is-using-anthropics-mythos-to-audit-government-code-despite-the-ban/