(March 25): SK Hynix Inc seeks to list its American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) in what may be one of the biggest US debuts by a foreign company ever, part of the chipmaker’s bid to keep pace with artificial intelligence’s (AI) voracious demand for memory.
The advanced memory supplier to Nvidia Corp aims to make an offering in New York in the second half of the year, chief executive officer Kwak Noh-Jung told shareholders during an annual general meeting on Wednesday. When asked if SK Hynix seeks to raise as much as KRW15 trillion (US$10 billion or $12.8 billion) as reported by local media, Kwak said no decision has been made, but that the company aims to boost its value in line with other AI hardware suppliers.
The move “opens the door to global investors and boosts liquidity at a key moment in the AI-driven memory cycle”, said Dilin Wu, a research strategist at Pepperstone Group who also warned that investors need to balance the upside in global visibility against short-term dilution risk. “Issuing new shares inevitably dilutes existing equity, and any perception that the company is raising cash at a cycle peak could weigh on sentiment.”
Shares of SK Hynix gained as much as 5.7% after the company said it made a confidential submission to the US Securities and Exchange Commission to list. SK Hynix’s Japanese chip gear suppliers Tokyo Electron Ltd, Advantest Corp and Screen Holdings Co also rose in Tokyo. Since the start of the year, SK Hynix’s stock price has risen more than 50% on top of a roughly 275% surge in 2025. Shares were up around 1% during afternoon trade.
Companies including Meta Platforms Inc and Alphabet Inc are gobbling up ever-rising amounts of memory via orders for millions of AI accelerators that come with big packs of DRAM. The lucrative returns on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) are spurring a race between SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics Co and Micron Technology Inc, while creating sharp shortages in conventional memory products.
A South Korean investor group cautioned about the dilution risk if the company were to issue new shares for the US float. It urged the chipmaker to buy back 10% to 15% of its shares and listing part of those in the US instead.
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“An ADR listing does not automatically lead to an equity valuation rerating,” the non-profit Korean Corporate Governance Forum said, calling such an assumption “highly naive”. “A rerating can only occur if governance improvements come first,” it said.
The offering is part of the company’s efforts to elevate the chipmaker’s global market valuation, Kwak said. SK Hynix will seek to keep its lead in AI semiconductors such as HBM by strategically investing the more than KRW100 trillion the company plans to set aside, he said.
Kwak also told shareholders that SK Hynix is negotiating a shift towards longer-term contracts to stabilise supply and alleviate shortage concerns, on a case-by-case basis.
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SK Hynix is ramping up investment to meet AI’s escalating needs for rapid access to data, with plans to build a sprawling semiconductor cluster in Yongin, South Korea. Earlier this week, it said it plans to spend US$8 billion on cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet lithography chipmaking tools from ASML Holding NV, equipment necessary to scale up quickly. That’s as Samsung plans to spend some US$73 billion on chip capacity expansion and research this year.
SK Hynix has so far dominated the HBM arena, but Samsung — which also makes smartphones and displays — has mobilised its heft to narrow the gap. Samsung’s market value stands at around US$760 billion to SK Hynix’s US$480 billion.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC) US listing in 1997 helped the company reach American investors. It’s also channelled passive inflows from exchange-traded funds tracking US-listed shares, bolstering its valuation.
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