SK Hynix raises $26.5 billion in the largest foreign IPO in US history
Nvidia's lead memory supplier sold 177.9 million ADSs at $149 and passed Alibaba's record. Every agent inference run rides on the memory this money builds.
- SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in its Nasdaq debut on July 10, the largest US listing by a non-American company ever, passing Alibaba's $25 billion in 2014.
- The deal: 177.9 million ADSs at $149, roughly seven times oversubscribed; proceeds fund a new Korean fab, a packaging plant, and EUV scanners.
- SK Hynix supplies the HBM memory under Nvidia's AI accelerators, with roughly 60% of that market.
SK Hynix, the lead supplier of the high-bandwidth memory inside Nvidia's AI accelerators, raised $26.5 billion in its Nasdaq debut on July 10, the largest US listing by a non-American company in history, TechCrunch reported. The Korean chipmaker sold 177.9 million American depositary shares at $149, passing the $25 billion record Alibaba set in 2014. The books were roughly seven times oversubscribed, and an over-allotment option could lift the total further.
What the money builds
Proceeds are earmarked for a new fabrication plant in Korea, an advanced packaging facility, and EUV lithography scanners, the machinery that determines how much HBM exists in 2028. SK Hynix holds roughly 60% of the HBM market. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick used the debut to publicly urge SK Hynix and Samsung to build fabs on American soil, a reminder that memory capacity is now treated as strategic infrastructure.
The floor under every token price
This is a funding story that belongs on an agent-economics site for one reason: HBM is the scarce input under every inference run. When three vendors repriced agent intelligence in a day, the assumption buried in every cut was that compute keeps getting cheaper per unit of work. The memory market is where that assumption gets tested, and a record-setting IPO pricing at a premium, seven times oversubscribed, says investors believe HBM stays scarce and expensive. Vendors can subsidize tokens for market share; nobody subsidizes wafers. If the floor holds, the price war above it has a bottom, and companies training their own agents on rented compute, like the enterprises Prime Intellect is courting, will feel it first.