Investing.com – , the world’s leading producer of DRAM memory chips and one of key “AI companies,” is set to price its blockbuster U.S. offering on Thursday. The ADRs of the Seoul-listed firm are expected to begin trading on Nasdaq Friday, under the ticker “SKHY.”
Here are key things to know ahead of SK Hynix’s historic U.S. market debut:
The deal in numbers
SK Hynix is said to price the offering at $149 per ADR, according to Thursday reports by both Bloomberg and Reuters, a figure the company has not yet officially confirmed, with the final price expected to be set Thursday. At that level, the offering — consisting of 17.79 million new shares — would raise approximately $26.5 billion, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s $25.6 billion IPO in 2019 and trailing only SpaceX’s $85.7 billion offering last month. Ten ADRs represent one common share of the Seoul-listed stock, which closed Thursday’s Korean session up 5.3% at 2,186,000 , extending a 680% gain over the past 12 months even after pulling back roughly 25% over the past two weeks amid broader AI-valuation concerns.
Who is buying and why
The bookbuild, which closed Wednesday U.S. time after being covered multiple times over according to Reuters, drew institutional orders starting at $200 million, with some topping $1 billion. Cornerstone investors Baillie Gifford Overseas, Coatue Management, and Situational Awareness Partners, the AI infrastructure fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, jointly indicated interest in purchasing up to a combined $7 billion of the ADRs. The investor enthusiasm reflects SK Hynix’s stranglehold on high-bandwidth memory, the stacked chips at the heart of every major AI accelerator. The company holds an estimated 50–55% share of the HBM market, with Nvidia and Alphabet’s Google among its largest customers. “As long as there is demand for graphic processors and AI data centers, SK Hynix is indispensable,” said Yoo Hoi-jun, an electrical engineering professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
Where the $26.5 billion goes
Proceeds are earmarked entirely for manufacturing capacity. According to TechTimes, the three disclosed allocations — roughly 31 trillion won for the first fabrication plant at the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster, 19 trillion won for the Cheongju P&T7 advanced packaging facility for AI memory, and 12 trillion won for ASML extreme ultraviolet lithography scanners — total approximately 62 trillion won, suggesting the reported line items reflect the broader multi-year capital program rather than a direct mapping to the $26.5 billion raised in this offering alone. The capital build is part of a broader South Korean national initiative: Seoul has announced a $576 billion chip investment program anchored by SK Hynix and Samsung, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly stating that SK Hynix would remain his company’s largest memory partner and that the current chip shortage would persist for several years.
The valuation gap
A central argument for the listing is closing the discount at which SK Hynix trades relative to its U.S. peers. currently carries a 12-month forward price-to-earnings multiple of 6.66x versus SK Hynix’s 5.5x, a gap CEO Kwok Noh-jung has flagged directly. “Through the ADR listing, we expect to diversify our investor base and achieve a valuation that better reflects our corporate value,” he said. Albert Yong, managing partner at Petra Capital Management, added that despite recent market volatility, demand for SK Hynix shares was likely to remain “relatively robust.”
What to watch
The immediate catalyst is Friday’s opening trade. The bookbuild outcome and the reported $149 target price set a high-water mark, but the real test of institutional conviction comes when SKHY begins printing on Nasdaq on July 10. Any meaningful premium or discount to the ADR issue price will signal how the broader U.S. market is willing to underwrite the AI-memory thesis at scale.
Beyond the debut, SK Hynix is scheduled to report second-quarter 2026 earnings on July 22. Consensus points to EPS of KRW 68,649.79, with six upward revisions in the past 90 days, and revenue of approximately 83 trillion won, the first results published as a dual-listed company, and a reading that will quickly test whether the new U.S. shareholder base was right to bet so heavily on continued AI infrastructure spending.