SK Hynix

Last week, the US listing of SK Hynix not only moved the stock markets but also set the South Korean foreign exchange market in motion. However, to understand why the company is at the center of the global AI boom today, one must look back two decades – to a time when SK Hynix was a restructuring case. 2026, 08:42 Asset Management | Financial Centers | Fintech | Economy Editor: asc The hunger for capital in the tech and AI world is gigantic. Hence the mega-IPOs, hence the increase in bonds in this area. 9 million ADRs at 149 dollars each. This is the largest IPO of a foreign company in US history.

The ADR certificates closed the first trading day around 13 to 15 percent above the issue price. The ADR structure of the IPO allows US investors to access SK Hynix shares in dollars without having to trade directly on the home market in Seoul – each ADR corresponds to one-tenth of a common share. And this now enables SK Hynix to repatriate the more than 26 billion dollars from the ADR sale to South Korea to finance the construction of new memory chip factories for AI demand. Even if it only affects one percent of the average foreign exchange turnover of South Korean forex banks, the effect on the otherwise rather weak won was noticeable.

Meanwhile, the euphoria is already cooling down again: the common share in Seoul plunged this week, after the ADRs had closed 13 percent up on Friday. Observers speak of investors agreeing on a "risk-off" scenario after military actions in Iran had strongly increased over the weekend. While the financial world focuses on price movements and valuation issues surrounding the Nasdaq listing of SK Hynix papers, it is worth looking at the company's origins. South Korea's second most valuable listed company after Samsung Electronics was a restructuring case just over two decades ago – today it is at the center of the global AI boom.

SK Hynix's roots go back to 1983, when the industrial conglomerate Hyundai entered the semiconductor industry with the founding of Hyundai Electronics Industries – part of South Korea's then state-sponsored diversification into strategic future industries. The company initially focused on DRAM memory chips and, thanks to high investments in manufacturing facilities, rose to become one of the world's leading DRAM manufacturers by the 1990s. However, the Asian crisis of 1997/98 brought the company to the brink of collapse: plummeting memory chip prices and high debts forced Hyundai into a comprehensive restructuring.

The company was renamed Hynix Semiconductor in 2001 and was subsequently dependent on creditor bailout packages for years. In 2002, a sale to US rival Micron Technology was even debated – but the deal failed. The decisive step came in 2012 with the acquisition by the South Korean SK Group, a conglomerate with a focus on energy and telecommunications, which acquired a majority stake from the creditors and renamed the company SK Hynix. Just one year later, in 2013, SK Hynix, together with US chip designer AMD, presented the world's first High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chip – a technology that enables significantly higher data transfer rates with lower power consumption through vertically stacked DRAM layers.

This early strategic decision is proving to be a stroke of luck today. For decades, memory chips were considered a classic cyclical business whose demand fluctuated with the PC and electronics market – a low-margin environment that pushed many competitors out of the market. Ultimately, only three major providers remained: Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix from South Korea, and Micron Technology from the USA. Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed this economy. AI systems are becoming ever larger and more computationally intensive, leading to a significant bottleneck in advanced memory chips in data centers.

SK Hynix benefits particularly strongly from this, as the HBM chips it co-developed have become a key component for the processors used to train and operate large AI platforms such as Claude by Anthropic or ChatGPT by OpenAI. According to market researcher TrendForce, the company is the leading HBM supplier for Nvidia with a share of around 51 percent, significantly ahead of Samsung Electronics with about 26 percent and Micron Technology with around 23 percent. Meanwhile, the competition among the three providers continues to intensify. Samsung and SK Hynix have announced the construction of two new factories each in South Korea, with a total volume of 800 trillion won (around 530 billion dollars).

Micron, in turn, plans to expand its US investments to 250 billion dollars by 2035. At the center of the technological race is currently HBM4, the latest memory generation with higher performance and capacity, which will be used in Nvidia's upcoming AI accelerator Vera Rubin. Although Samsung was the first to deliver commercial HBM4 chips to Nvidia in February, all three memory manufacturers have now qualified their HBM4 chips for Vera Rubin; the delivery of the AI system is to be ramped up in the second half of 2026. 77 trillion dollars on Nasdaq – almost three times as much capital as SK Hynix, and thus significantly surpassing the previous record holder Saudi Aramco (2019).

At first glance, the comparison is obvious: two mega-IPOs within a month, both on Nasdaq, both with a strong AI connection in the equity story. A closer look, however, reveals how different the two cases actually are. 4 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2026. 69 billion dollars in revenue in the same quarter. 77 trillion dollars thus corresponds to 90 to 100 times the annual revenue – a bet on a very distant future, as even benevolent analysis houses like Erste Asset Management admit. Morningstar temporarily estimated the fair value at only 780 billion dollars, more than half below the IPO target.