SK Hynix stock to debut in the U.S. on the Nasdaq
SK Hynix It opened at $170 per share on Nasdaq on Friday, rising nearly 14% as U.S. investors jumped at the opportunity to buy shares in South Korea’s second most valuable company.
The stock trades under the symbol SKHYV and will switch to SKHY starting Tuesday.
The company’s American depository receipts, or ADRs, were priced at $149 and raised $26.5 billion due to aggressive expansion plans that included investing in new factories and equipment.
“It’s kind of a dream, and now it’s a dream come true,” SK Hynix President Chey Tae-won told CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos on Friday.
SK Hynix trails only Samsung in terms of market capitalization in its home country. Like its larger rival, the company makes computer memory that phones and computers use to store short-term data. SK Hynix’s client list includes some of the biggest names in technology: Nvidia And Apple.
Memory had been tucked away in a quiet corner of the semiconductor world for decades, but the AI boom has transformed it into a massive growth market.
Tae-won told CNBC that when he meets with customers and partners, everyone expects more chips. Even when SK Hynix announced it would double capacity within five years, customers still said they needed more, he said.
“All my customers said, ‘This isn’t enough, man, and we need more,'” Tae-won said Friday.
SK Hynix’s valuation rose more than sevenfold last year as demand for AI infrastructure created shortages of computer memory and prices soared.
SK Hynix is a leader in high-performance memory used in AI chips from Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company. Compared to RAM for phones or laptops, AI chips require high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, which is created through a complex process that involves stacking many layers of traditional memory together.
“The demand is exponentially huge, so I don’t see signs of HBM demand decreasing,” Tae-won said.
Betting on the memory boom has proven to be risky due to the cyclical nature of the business. Major technology shifts such as the dot-com craze, the growth of smartphones, or the shift from packaged software to the cloud have brought huge demand for memory to power new devices. This often results in an oversupply and subsequent decline in prices.
This concern is quite common today, given the rampant growth of artificial intelligence. However, Tae-won said he is confident that SK Hynix’s memory demand has changed permanently based on past boom-bust cycles.
“The AI agent, the physical AI robot, actually needs a lot of memory chips,” Tae-won said.
Some of that HBM will be packaged in the United States, following the company’s announcement that it will build a $4 billion advanced packaging facility in Indiana. However, the majority of SK Hynix’s planned expansion in the coming years will occur in South Korea. This includes a cluster of chip manufacturing facilities in Yongin that will cost $390 billion.
SK Hynix’s listing comes about a month after Elon Musk’s listing SpaceX It went public with the largest IPO in history.
WRISTWATCH: SK Hynix to raise $28 billion from Nasdaq listing
