SK Hynix Storms Onto Nasdaq

The listing we reported earlier this week has landed, and it landed hard. SK Hynix, the South Korean maker of the high-bandwidth memory that sits next to Nvidia's AI chips, made its Nasdaq debut on July 10 and closed up about 13% at $168.01, according to CNBC and Fortune.

The company priced its American depositary receipts at $149 and raised $26.5 billion, the largest US share sale ever by a foreign company and the third-largest market debut on record, behind only SpaceX's listing last month. The stock briefly ran up as much as 17% after trading opened before settling back. By the closing bell SK Hynix was worth roughly $1 trillion, second among Korean firms only to Samsung.

Why memory suddenly matters

For years memory chips were the unglamorous, cyclical corner of the semiconductor business. The AI boom changed that. Training and running large models leans heavily on high-bandwidth memory, and SK Hynix supplies most of it, which gives the company a chokehold on a part every AI data centre needs. Its chairman told CNBC that demand was "enormous."

The debut is another sign that investors are chasing the physical layer of AI, the chips and the machines, rather than the software sitting on top. SK Hynix joins a run of hardware and infrastructure names drawing the market's cash this summer, from Nvidia's climb back above a $5 trillion valuation to a wave of chip and robotics listings. Whether that enthusiasm holds is a separate question. For one Friday in July, at least, the market's answer was not ambiguous.