SK Hynix raises $26.5 billion in the largest foreign IPO in U.S. history

SK Hynix, the South Korean memory-chip maker, has staged the largest stock market debut by a foreign company in Wall Street history. The company announced that it raised $26.5 billion (40 trillion South Korean won) in its US initial public offering, surpassing the $25 billion Alibaba raised in its 2014 IPO. With this deal, SK Hynix becomes the largest listing by a non-US firm ever recorded in the country.

The company sold 177.9 million American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) at $149 each, a structure designed so that US investors can buy stakes equivalent to roughly one-tenth of the value of a full share listed in Seoul. SK Hynix began trading on the Nasdaq on Friday, July 10, 2026, under the temporary ticker SKHYV; regular trading will start on Monday, July 13, under the definitive symbol SKHY.

The market's reception has been remarkable: the stock opened 14% above its offering price and kept rising in the first hours of trading, even though the company priced its US shares at a 2.7% premium to the average of its three previous trading days in Seoul, according to its own filing with the Korea Exchange. According to specialized media, demand for the offering exceeded the number of available shares by more than seven times.

The outcome is striking because South Korean companies usually trade at a discount to their global peers, a phenomenon known as the 'Korea discount'. Investors typically attribute that valuation gap to complex corporate governance structures, low shareholder returns, regulatory uncertainty and geopolitical risks tied to North Korea. However, SK Hynix appears to have escaped that penalty thanks to its position as one of the leading makers of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a key component in artificial-intelligence graphics processors. Nvidia currently relies on SK Hynix as one of its main suppliers of this type of memory.

According to the offering documentation, the funds raised will go toward three fronts: the construction of a new fabrication plant (fab) in South Korea —currently in development to address the global memory shortage driven by AI demand—, a new packaging facility in that country, and the acquisition of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography scanners, the machinery essential to producing next-generation chips.

That same Thursday, in parallel with this deal, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick visited a Micron event —one of SK Hynix's main competitors and the leading US memory maker— and delivered a message aimed at the entire semiconductor industry. Lutnick said he is already in talks with Samsung (the world's third-largest memory maker) and with SK Hynix about the possibility of building new factories on US soil, with the stated goal of preventing South Korea from continuing to dominate this strategic technology on its own.

Micron, for its part, has already joined that line: the company announced a $250 billion investment plan in new manufacturing capacity in the United States, a commitment that, according to the company itself, will generate more than 90,000 jobs and keep cutting-edge chip production on US territory.

It is especially significant that Lutnick's request comes just as the two large South Korean memory makers —Samsung and SK Hynix— have jointly committed more than $550 billion in new manufacturing investments within South Korea itself. The contrast between the two moves —a record Wall Street IPO backed by US investors and, at the same time, political pressure from Washington to move production onto American soil— clearly portrays the geopolitical tension now running through the memory-chip supply chain, an input that is increasingly critical to sustaining the artificial-intelligence boom.