SK Hynix raised $26.51 billion in its US listing of American depositary receipts, topping Alibaba's 2014 record for the largest US listing by a foreign company. Investor demand for the chipmaker's high-bandwidth memory business drove the deal, which anchored a third quarter that ranked as the second-busiest for US IPOs since 2021.
SK Hynix sold 177.9 million ADRs at $149 apiece, raising $26.51 billion when it completed its US offering on July 10, 2026. That total topped Alibaba's 2014 record for the largest US listing by a foreign company. An ADR is a US-traded stand-in for a foreign company's shares, letting American investors buy in without dealing with an overseas exchange.
Demand outstrips supply at listing
The offering was more than seven times oversubscribed, meaning investors asked for well over seven times the shares on offer. Cornerstone investors, including Baillie Gifford and Coatue Management, showed interest in up to roughly $7 billion of the deal.
Trading on day one reflected that appetite. The ADRs opened around $170, a jump of approximately 14% from the offer price, and reached intraday highs near $177. At listing, the company's market capitalization sat around $1.1 trillion; SK Hynix shares in Seoul had already pushed its market capitalization past $1 trillion earlier in 2026.
High-bandwidth memory draws the crowd
The draw for investors is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, which stacks memory chips vertically next to the processor to move large volumes of data quickly — exactly what training and running large AI models demands. SK Hynix held approximately 56% of the global HBM market as of the first quarter of 2026 and supplies memory chips to Nvidia and Microsoft for their AI chips.
The company plans to use the proceeds mainly to build new fabrication and packaging facilities in South Korea, and to buy advanced equipment including EUV scanners, the precision tools that determine how advanced a chipmaker's products can be.
A busy quarter for US listings
US IPOs raised $36.1 billion in the third quarter of 2026, excluding special purpose acquisition companies, and SK Hynix accounted for the lion's share of that sum on its own. The quarter ranked as the second-busiest for US IPOs since 2021, even as smaller offerings struggled for traction.
Source: Crypto Briefing
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