Trillion-dollar South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix debuts on Nasdaq at $170 a share, signaling strong AI appetite among traders

SK Hynix, the South Korean chipmaker worth $1 trillion, opened Friday at $170 a share on the Nasdaq and quickly rose higher – signaling investors are still eager for access to the AI trade, even after weeks of wild swings in tech and chip stocks. As of 2:45 p.m.ET, its American depositary receipts were up nearly 20% to $18.61, after raising $26.5 billion in a blockbuster Wall Street offering – the largest-ever US share sale by a foreign company.More than 52 million shares of SK Hynix had traded by noon, “a huge number” less than 30 minutes after its debut, JJ Kinahan, head of retail expansion and alternative investment products at Cboe Global Markets, told the Wall Street Journal.“It’s an incredible story for this company,” he said.

“Revenue tripled between 2022 and 2025, but the key question is whether it can continue this incredible pace of growth.”The memory-chip maker – which is South Korea’s second-most valuable company, trailing only Samsung – traded under the ticker symbol SKHYV, and will switch to SKHY as of Tuesday.Its listing comes a month after Elon Musk’s SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq in the largest-ever IPO.Investors are anticipating more massive AI IPOs from OpenAI and Anthropic later this year or in early 2027.SK Hynix specializes in high bandwidth memory, or HBM, chips that have a higher memory capacity than the typical RAM chips used in cell phones and laptops. Tech giants have gone all-in on artificial intelligence, racing to build out power-hungry data centers.

That boom in demand has caused shortages and sent costs soaring, resulting in blowout profits for manufacturers like SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron.SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung told Bloomberg Friday that he expects memory-chip shortages to persist beyond 2030, saying customers are signing long-term contracts with the manufacturer.The company – which sells to some of the biggest names in the industry, like Nvidia and Apple – has seen its valuation jump more than ...