SK Hynix jumps 13% in $26.5B Nasdaq debut, tops $1T cap

A Korean memory maker just walked onto Nasdaq and closed the day worth a trillion dollars. SK Hynix's American depositary shares priced at $149, opened at $170, and closed up roughly 13% at $168.01 on Friday, according to Forbes. The $26.5 billion raise is the largest US listing ever by a foreign company, and the offering was reportedly about seven times oversubscribed.

The reason this matters more than a typical IPO pop is who SK Hynix is in the AI stack. The company supplies the high-bandwidth memory sitting inside every Nvidia H100, H200, and Blackwell GPU, which means the trillion-dollar market cap is US public investors pricing in that HBM supply stays tight for the foreseeable future. Chairman Chey Tae-won told CNBC that 'the demand is enormous, exponentially,' and that customers keep asking for more even after SK Hynix said it would double capacity within five years.

For everyone else in memory, the read-through is uncomfortable. SK Hynix now sits at a $1 trillion market value, second in South Korea only to Samsung at $1.2 trillion, with fresh dollar-denominated capital to spend on fabs at exactly the moment Samsung and Micron are trying to close the HBM gap. A US listing also gives American institutions and retail a direct AI-memory proxy that previously meant working through a Seoul brokerage.

The honest caveat is that the whole thesis rides on the AI capex cycle continuing at its current pace. If hyperscaler orders soften, that capacity doubling starts to look expensive, and a seven-times oversubscribed book can unwind quickly once early holders take profits. What the reporting doesn't give you is how SK Hynix intends to spend the $26.5 billion, the lockup terms for insiders, or whether HBM allocations to Nvidia are contractually locked and at what pricing.

The forward-looking piece is who benefits. SK Hynix gets hard-currency firepower for capex, US investors get the cleanest listed HBM exposure, and Nvidia gets a supplier newly incentivized to sprint on capacity. Take the trillion-dollar close as a market vote of confidence rather than a settled valuation.