SK Hynix will price its Nasdaq offering on Thursday. The South Korean memory chipmaker is selling 177.9 million American depositary receipts under the ticker SKHY, raising approximately $28 billion in the second-largest share sale of 2026 after SpaceX. The offering is more than seven times oversubscribed.
Fourteen years ago, the company was on the verge of liquidation.
The Rescue
In 2012, SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won overruled internal opposition to acquire a 21 percent stake in Hynix for 3.37 trillion won. The company carried nearly $14 billion in debt, had been rejected by Micron as an acquisition target, and had spent a decade under creditor control after the collapse in DRAM prices gutted its balance sheet. SK Group poured capital into a technology called high-bandwidth memory, which at the time was costly, unprofitable, and dismissed by most of the semiconductor industry as a niche product.
SK Hynix's market capitalization is now approximately $1.2 trillion. It surpassed Samsung Electronics this year as South Korea's most valuable listed company, ending a reign that lasted twenty-five years. The stock has gained more than 300 percent in 2026.
The Bottleneck
SK Hynix supplies approximately 70 percent of Nvidia's orders for HBM4, the high-bandwidth memory stacked on top of every AI training and inference GPU. Nvidia cannot ship a graphics processor without it. SK Hynix holds between 50 and 55 percent of the overall HBM market. Its production capacity is fully booked through the end of 2026.
The operating margins tell the story. SK Hynix reported a 72 percent operating margin in the first quarter of 2026, an all-time record. Analysts project the second quarter will exceed it, with some forecasts approaching 80 percent. Nvidia reported a 65.6 percent operating margin in its most recent quarter.
The memory supplier has higher margins than the GPU company it supplies. The pricing power in the AI supply chain has inverted: the component that constrains shipments captures more profit per dollar of revenue than the product it enables.
The Cornerstone
Three institutions have committed to purchasing up to $7 billion in ADRs, approximately 25 percent of the total offering. They are Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based asset manager; Coatue Management, the technology-focused hedge fund; and Situational Awareness Partners, founded by Leopold Aschenbrenner.
Aschenbrenner is a former researcher on OpenAI's Superalignment team. In 2024, he published an extended essay called "Situational Awareness" arguing that artificial general intelligence was likely within a decade and that infrastructure constraints would determine which countries and companies captured its value. He left OpenAI, founded a hedge fund, and built it into one of the largest AI-focused investment firms in the world.
His fund's largest public equity commitment is in a South Korean memory chip company. The person most associated with the argument that AGI is imminent is not betting on the AI labs, the GPU designer, or the cloud providers. He is betting on the component that sits between the software and the silicon, the one that every other layer of the stack requires and none of them can manufacture.
Three Signals
On the same day SK Hynix's offering reached seven times oversubscription, Micron Technology announced it would invest more than $250 billion in the United States through 2035, up from $200 billion pledged the previous year. The expanded plan targets 40 percent of Micron's DRAM production on American soil and is expected to create nearly 100,000 jobs across facilities in New York, Idaho, and Virginia.
Also on July 9, The Information reported that China plans to allow its major AI companies, including Alibaba, ByteDance, and DeepSeek, to purchase a limited number of Nvidia H200 chips. Beijing had previously restricted imports of American-designed AI processors to encourage domestic chip development. The reversal came because Chinese firms face a computing capacity shortage that domestic hardware suppliers cannot resolve. Approved purchases would be capped at fewer than 200,000 units.
Next week, CXMT, China's largest DRAM manufacturer, opens investor subscriptions for a $4.3 billion IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. CXMT's first-quarter revenue jumped 719 percent year over year, swinging to a net profit of 33 billion yuan. But CXMT manufactures commodity DRAM on mature process nodes. It does not produce high-bandwidth memory. The gap between commodity memory and AI memory is the gap between a $4.3 billion offering and a $28 billion one.
Three capital events in one week, all pointed at the same layer of the technology stack.
The Discount
The Korea discount has been a fixture of equity analysis for decades. Korean companies trade at lower multiples than peers in other developed markets, attributed to chaebol governance, limited shareholder returns, and capital market structure. SK Hynix trades at approximately six times forward earnings. A comparable business listed on an American exchange would command significantly more.
The Nasdaq listing eliminates the structural barriers that kept global institutional capital from the stock: the Korean won denomination, the settlement complexity, the trading-hour mismatch. But it does something more fundamental than removing friction. It places the bottleneck on the same exchange as the companies it constrains. When Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom trade on Nasdaq and the component they cannot ship without trades on the Korea Exchange, the market treats the supplier as a foreign commodity producer. When it lists alongside them, the market can price it as what it is.
The Korea discount was never really about Korea. It was about access. The most profitable company in the AI supply chain was trading on an exchange most American fund managers could not reach. The $28 billion offering was oversubscribed seven times because the capital was already waiting.