SK Hynix has filed to raise up to 45.45 trillion won, roughly $29bn, through a listing of American depositary receipts on Nasdaq, the South Korean memory maker disclosed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday.
The company has tentatively set July 10 for the debut and intends to issue 17.79 million new shares to back the receipts, with 10 ADRs representing one common share.
At the top of the indicated range, the offering would be the largest ADR sale on record, ahead of the $21.8bn Alibaba raised in its 2014 New York debut. There is a small wrinkle in the headline number.
The destination of the money is unusually specific for a deal this size. SK Hynix said the entire raise will fund capacity, naming a chip fabrication plant in Yongin, an advanced-packaging fab in Cheongju, and equipment purchases that include extreme ultraviolet scanners, the lithography machines that print the smallest features on a wafer. None of it is going to shareholders or debt.
For a company whose order book is already full, that reads less like a war chest and more like a bill.
SK Hynix is the world’s second-largest memory maker and the dominant supplier of high-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM that sits beside Nvidia’s accelerators and feeds them data.
That position, rather than any broad recovery in commodity chips, is what has carried the share price.
Industry estimates put the company at roughly 60 to 70 per cent of the HBM4 volume allocated to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, well ahead of Samsung and Micron, and the multi-year deal with Nvidia signed this month formalised it as a co-development partner rather than a vendor.
The size of the planned raise has moved a long way in a short time. When the prospect first surfaced, the figures ran from about $10bn to $14bn for a US listing as soon as August.
By June 16, bankers were citing up to 40 trillion won, about $26.5bn. The 45.45 trillion now in the filing is larger still, and the timeline has pulled forward to July.
Underwriting the deal are BofA Securities, Citigroup Global Markets, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Securities. The listing arrives days after a milestone that gave it pricing leverage.
On June 22, SK Hynix passed Samsung in market value to become South Korea’s most valuable listed company on a common-stock basis, the first change at the top of the Korea Exchange since Samsung claimed it in November 2000.
A month earlier the company had crossed $1 trillion in market capitalisation, the third chip company to do so after Nvidia and TSMC.
The run behind those figures has been steep. SK Hynix shares have risen several hundred per cent over the past two years, and the company overtook Samsung on annual profit for the first time in January.
A Nasdaq listing gives international investors a way to own that growth without trading in Seoul, and gives SK Hynix dollars for the fabs it has already committed to.
The filing does not settle the question that hangs over every memory cycle. The business is famously cyclical, and the current upswing is being priced as though it will not turn.
HBM capacity for 2026 is sold out and shortages are forecast into 2027, but SK Hynix is raising money to expand for demand stretching well beyond that.
The filing is a regulatory milestone, not a closed deal. Pricing, share count, and the listing date can still move, and the figures depend on a US Securities and Exchange Commission review expected in the coming weeks.
If the deal prices at the top of its range on July 10, SK Hynix will have written the largest ADR offering in history. The harder number to forecast is how long the appetite that justifies it lasts.
