The final orders were still landing in New York as the clock ran down. Bankers running SK Hynix’s American depositary receipt sale had told investors for days that the books would close at 4 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday, and the demand never let up. U.S. investors submitted orders starting at roughly $200 million, with several of the largest exceeding $1 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The deal has been subscribed multiple times over, that person said, leaving underwriters to decide how much to allocate rather than whether the sale would clear. At $28 billion, it ranks among the largest equity offerings ever assembled, and it is being watched on three continents as a test of how much capital investors will put behind the artificial-intelligence supply chain.
SK Hynix plans to fix the final ADR price Thursday after the close of trading in Seoul, with allocations settled later Thursday evening U.S. time, the company said in a filing with U.S. regulators. Trading on the Nasdaq is scheduled to begin July 10.
An American depositary receipt is a dollar-denominated certificate that lets global funds own a foreign company’s shares without navigating the Korean market. For SK Hynix, the structure does double duty: it broadens the shareholder base beyond Asia and raises fresh capital in dollars, the currency in which most of its customers pay. The timing is deliberate, because the company has become the single most important supplier of high-bandwidth memory, the specialized chips that feed Nvidia’s AI accelerators.
Its dominance is hard to overstate. SK Hynix controlled roughly 58% of the HBM market in the first quarter, according to Counterpoint Research, more than Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology combined. That lead has translated into profit and a market value that has climbed past $1 trillion as AI data-center spending has surged, a fivefold jump in a year that has turned the memory industry’s classic boom-and-bust cycle into something closer to a structural shortage.
The numbers behind the boom are the ones the company’s bankers are selling. Bank of America forecasts the HBM market will reach $54.6 billion in 2026, up 58% from a year earlier, and has named SK Hynix its top pick in the memory sector. Goldman Sachs expects demand for HBM from custom, application-specific AI chips to jump 82% this year, evidence that appetite is broadening beyond general-purpose GPUs from Nvidia.
The technology roadmap supports the pitch. SK Hynix established the world’s first HBM4 mass-production system last September and has been shipping paid samples to Nvidia, with industry sources saying no major problems surfaced during final validation. UBS projects SK Hynix will hold roughly 70% of the HBM4 market serving Nvidia’s next-generation Rubin platform, while Barclays expects the company to keep more than half of total HBM share for several years.
Demand is also becoming contractual rather than transactional. SK Hynix said in July it had signed 10 long-term agreements with major customers. In a broader arrangement, Nvidia agreed to a $500 billion deal with SK Group that includes co-developing next-generation memory and building new data centers with SK Telecom by 2027, an acknowledgment that the chip maker’s output is now mission-critical infrastructure.
None of this comes without risk. The memory industry is cyclical, and the current boom has echoes of earlier supercycles that ended in glut and price collapse. Chinese rival CXMT is expanding and just completed a blockbuster debut on the Shanghai market, and U.S. export controls mean SK Hynix cannot sell its leading-edge HBM into China, a constraint analysts say will shape capacity decisions for years. Samsung, meanwhile, has recovered from yield setbacks, shipped HBM4 samples to Nvidia, and is targeting a 50% increase in HBM production capacity by the end of the year.
The company is spending accordingly. It is building the Cheongju M15X fab in South Korea, deepening a packaging partnership with TSMC, and adding production in the United States as Washington presses for domestic memory output. The ADR proceeds give it a war chest in dollars, and the offering itself carries a message to rivals: the market’s largest memory maker now answers to a global investor base.
For investors, the question is whether the cycle lasts long enough to justify the price. Analysts point out that SK Hynix has outperformed SpaceX, the other giant of the summer’s capital markets, since both made U.S. debuts, and that its forward price-to-sales ratio looks more reasonable by comparison. The allocation call Thursday evening will be the first signal of how much conviction the market actually holds, and trading on the Nasdaq a day later will put that conviction to the test.
The offering also reshapes the capital-markets calendar in Asia. Korean retail investors, who have piled into memory stocks during the AI rally, will watch the pricing closely, and a strong debut would give other Seoul-listed chip and battery companies a template for raising dollar capital abroad. Few expect the books to close quietly; the only open question is how much of the demand the underwriters choose to satisfy.
