South Korean computer chip maker SK Hynix has raised $26.5 billion (£19.8 billion) in a New York stock offering, making it the largest ever listing of a foreign company in the US.
The company, a key supplier to artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant Nvidia, said Thursday it had sold 177.9 million shares of its U.S. depositary stock at $149 per share. The stock is scheduled to begin trading on Nasdaq starting Friday.
SK Hynix’s domestic market value exceeded $1 trillion in May, thanks to a surge in demand for AI chips.
This year, stock prices in Korea have more than tripled, and along with Samsung Electronics, it has helped raise the KOSPI index by more than 70% during the same period.
SK Hynix is one of the world’s leading memory chip manufacturers. With hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on AI, the industry has made great strides.
Share prices of rivals Samsung Electronics and Micron have more than doubled in recent months.
Jaewon Choi, a finance professor at Seoul National University, said, “The U.S. listing gives SK Hynix easier access to huge potential investments from the world’s largest economy, which has fewer barriers than Korea.”
Traders are watching the listing closely as a “test of the waters” on whether investor enthusiasm for the memory chip maker will last, Choi said.
The AI boom has led to a rush of companies raising money in the stock market.
Last June, GrokAI owner SpaceX raised $85.7 billion, making it the world’s largest publicly traded company.
Meanwhile, AI developers Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing to go public at a valuation of more than $1 trillion.
