SK Hynix The stock opened at $170 per share on the Nasdaq market on Friday, up about 14%, as U.S. investors jumped at the chance to take a stake in South Korea’s second-most valuable company.
The stock trades under the ticker symbol SKHYV, which will switch to SKHY starting Tuesday.
The company’s American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) are priced at $149, raising $26.5 billion for aggressive expansion plans that include investments in new plant and equipment.
“This was kind of a dream, and now it’s a dream come true,” SK Hynix Chairman Choi Tae-won told CNBC’s Cristina Parsineveros on Friday.
SK Hynix is the only company that is behind Samsung in terms of market capitalization in its home country. Like its larger rivals, the company makes computer memory that cell phones and PCs use to store short-term data. SK Hynix’s customer roster includes some of the largest companies in the technology industry, including: Nvidia and apple.
For decades, memory was hidden away in a quiet corner of the semiconductor industry, but the artificial intelligence boom has turned it into a huge growth market.
Taewon told CNBC that everyone expects to tip more when meeting with customers and partners. He said that even when SK Hynix announced it would double its production capacity within five years, customers still said they needed more capacity.
“All my clients said, ‘Well, that’s not enough, we need more,'” Taewon said Friday.
SK Hynix’s valuation has increased more than seven times over the past year as demand for AI infrastructure has caused computer memory shortages and sent prices soaring.
SK Hynix is a leader in high-performance memory used in AI chips from Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company. Compared to RAM in mobile phones and laptops, AI chips require high-bandwidth memory (HBM). HBM is created through a complex process of stacking many layers of conventional memory.
“The demand is exponentially huge, so I don’t see much sign of HBM demand slowing down,” Taewon said.
The cyclical nature of business means betting on memory booms has proven risky. Big technology changes like the dot-com craze, the growth of smartphones, and the move from packaged software to the cloud have created a huge demand for memory to power new devices. That often leads to oversupply, followed by a collapse in prices.
This concern is widespread today given the rapid growth of AI. However, Taewon said SK Hynix believes memory demand has permanently changed from past boom-and-bust cycles.
“AI agents, physical AI robots, actually need a lot of memory chips,” Taewon said.
Some of its HBM will be packaged in the United States after the company announced it would build a $4 billion advanced packaging plant in Indiana. However, the bulk of SK Hynix’s planned expansion over the next few years will take place in South Korea. This includes the Yongin chip manufacturing complex, which will cost $390 billion.
SK Hynix’s listing will take place about a month after Elon Musk’s listing. space x The company went public in the largest initial public offering in history.
Attention: SK Hynix raises $28 billion on NASDAQ listing
