South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix’s record-breaking Wall Street debut is fueling a fresh surge of interest from international companies eyeing U.S. exchanges, according to Nasdaq Inc. leadership, as the memory-chip giant’s historic listing reshapes expectations for how foreign firms tap American capital markets.
SK Hynix began trading on the Nasdaq Friday under the temporary ticker SKHYV after pricing its American depositary receipts at $149 apiece, raising $26.5 billion in the largest-ever U.S. share sale by a non-American company. The offering topped Alibaba’s $25 billion raise in 2014 and ranks as the third-largest U.S. listing on record, trailing only SpaceX’s $85.7 billion debut last month and Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion offering in 2019.
The stock surged in its opening session, jumping as much as 17% to around $174.50 shortly after trading opened, following earlier indications the shares could trade as much as 21% above their offering price. The company sold 177.9 million ADRs, with the securities structured so U.S. investors can buy in at roughly a tenth of the cost of a full share on SK Hynix’s primary Seoul listing. Demand for the offering was strong: investors sought more than seven times the number of shares available before the deal was priced, according to Reuters.
Nasdaq Inc. President Nelson Griggs said the blockbuster listing is already spurring other international companies to weigh the U.S. market for either new initial public offerings or ADR sales, Bloomberg reported. Griggs made the remarks Friday, fresh off a trip to Europe during which he met with executives considering crossing the Atlantic for capital. According to Bloomberg, Griggs grouped the foreign issuers showing interest in U.S. listings into two categories: early-stage companies that haven’t yet listed anywhere, and established firms with existing local listings that are weighing the addition of U.S. ADRs.
The enthusiasm reflects a broader pattern that has defined 2026’s IPO market, in which international companies riding the artificial intelligence infrastructure boom have looked to U.S. exchanges for deeper capital pools and stronger valuations than they can typically command at home. Analysts have pointed to a persistent valuation gap between SK Hynix and its American rival, Micron Technology, as one motivation behind the Nasdaq listing. At the time of its debut, SK Hynix traded at roughly 5.5 times forward earnings, compared with Micron’s 6.66 times, a discrepancy the company has said it hopes the U.S. listing will help close.
SK Hynix Chairman Chey Tae-won traveled to New York personally for the company’s bell-ringing ceremony, underscoring how central the listing is to the conglomerate’s broader ambitions. “It’s a kind of dream, and now it’s a dream come true,” Chey told CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos on Friday. Chey said that when he meets with customers and partners, demand for chips consistently outpaces expectations, telling CNBC that even after SK Hynix announced plans to double its production capacity within five years, customers pushed back that the increase wouldn’t be enough.
The listing arrives amid an extraordinary run of financial performance for the company. SK Hynix posted first-quarter revenue of 52.58 trillion won, or about $38.1 billion, a 198% jump from the same period a year earlier, with net profit margin climbing to 77% from 46%, driven largely by high-bandwidth memory chips critical to AI accelerators. Analysts polled by data provider LSEG expect SK Hynix’s revenue to more than triple again this year to roughly $235 billion.
SK Hynix’s market value stood at about $1 trillion as of Friday, making it South Korea’s second-largest company behind Samsung Electronics. Its Seoul-listed shares have climbed 222% so far this year and roughly 634% over the past twelve months, a rally tied to the artificial intelligence industry’s voracious appetite for the high-bandwidth memory that powers AI chips from Nvidia and other producers. SK Hynix controls roughly 58% of the global HBM market, according to Counterpoint Research figures cited by CNBC, ahead of competitors Micron and Samsung, which each hold about 21%.
Market strategists framed the debut as a significant test of investor conviction in the durability of the broader AI trade, particularly after a recent pullback in semiconductor stocks tied to concerns over slowing AI spending. “Global semiconductors is the most crowded trade in the world right now,” Thomas Hayes, chairman at Great Hill Capital in New York, said. Giuseppe Sette, co-founder of investment analysis platform Reflexivity, said the Nasdaq listing was a deliberate strategic choice by the company. “This is the purest large-cap way for U.S. investors to own the AI-memory theme, and Hynix deliberately picked Nasdaq to tap that demand and the higher valuations U.S. chip names command versus Seoul,” Sette said, adding that “SK Hynix gets its deal done on the strength of the story, but companies coming after it may face a tougher, more selective market.”
The offering also drew attention from U.S. policymakers. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick visited a Micron event this week and said he was already in discussions with Samsung and SK Hynix about building additional manufacturing facilities in the United States, seeking to prevent South Korea from continuing to dominate advanced chip production. Micron has separately committed to investing $250 billion in new U.S. manufacturing, a pledge the company says will create more than 90,000 jobs.
SK Hynix has said proceeds from the U.S. offering will help fund new production facilities and equipment purchases, including advanced lithography machines, with the bulk of its expansion still concentrated in South Korea. The company has also committed to a $4 billion advanced packaging plant in Indiana as part of a broader push to establish a domestic U.S. manufacturing footprint alongside its listing.
Regular trading in SK Hynix shares under the permanent ticker SKHY is set to begin Monday. For Nasdaq, the listing represents a marquee win in its ongoing competition with rival exchanges for high-profile international offerings, and Griggs’ comments suggest the exchange sees the SK Hynix deal as a template it hopes to replicate with other large overseas issuers in the months ahead.
