SK Hynix completed one of the largest foreign listings in US history. The South Korean memory chipmaker's American Depositary Receipt offering on Nasdaq attracted roughly $200 billion in investor demand for a deal worth approximately $28 billion.
The top 25 institutional accounts secured about 67% of the total ADRs. The top 10 alone secured nearly half. The offering was revised down slightly from an initial target of up to $29 billion.
SK Hynix issued 177.9 million ADRs. Each ADR represents one-tenth of a common share. The shares are expected to begin trading under the ticker SKHY around July 10, 2026.
All proceeds are earmarked for domestic manufacturing capacity in South Korea. The focus is on expanding chip fabrication capabilities at the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster. The company will also purchase cutting-edge ASML EUV scanners needed to scale high-bandwidth memory production.
SK Hynix is South Korea's second-largest memory producer and the global leader in high-bandwidth memory technology. HBM is the specialized memory that sits inside Nvidia's AI accelerators and AMD's competing products. Without HBM, the AI training infrastructure that companies are spending hundreds of billions to build simply doesn't work.
Accessing SK Hynix shares has historically required navigating the Korean stock exchange. That created what market participants call the "Korea discount," a persistent undervaluation of Korean companies relative to global peers. This Nasdaq listing is designed to eliminate that discount.
The concentrated allocation could create interesting trading dynamics when SKHY begins trading. When a small number of large holders control a significant portion of the float, early trading can be either very stable or very volatile. The 67% concentration among the top 25 accounts means secondary market liquidity could be thinner than the headline deal size might suggest.
Samsung, SK Hynix's primary rival in HBM production, has been struggling to qualify its latest-generation HBM chips with major customers. SK Hynix's decision to invest every dollar of this offering into expanding manufacturing capacity suggests the company sees an opportunity to widen its lead.