SK Hynix Rises 13% in Nasdaq Debut as Chairman Says Memory Demand Is "Enormous"

SK Hynix made a strong entrance on the Nasdaq on Friday, with shares of the South Korean memory chipmaker climbing 13% on their first day of U.S. trading — underscoring surging investor appetite for AI infrastructure plays.

The stock closed at $168.01 after opening at $170, trading under the temporary ticker symbol SKHYV before switching to SKHY as of Tuesday. American depositary receipts were priced at $149, raising $26.5 billion to fund the company's expansion plans, including new factories and equipment.

"It's a kind of dream, and now it's a dream come true," SK Hynix Chairman Chey Tae-won told CNBC's Kristina Partsinevelos on Friday.

SK Hynix is South Korea's second-most valuable company by market capitalization, trailing only Samsung. Its roster of customers includes Nvidia and Apple, and the company holds a leading position in high bandwidth memory, or HBM — the high-performance chip used to power AI accelerators.

Unlike conventional RAM found in phones or laptops, HBM is manufactured through a complex process that stacks multiple layers of traditional memory together, making it central to AI workloads that require rapid data throughput.

The company's valuation has risen more than sevenfold over the past year as AI infrastructure demand created a shortage in computer memory and drove prices sharply higher.

Tae-won said customers have consistently told the company that even its most ambitious expansion targets fall short. After SK Hynix announced plans to double its capacity within five years, he said buyers pushed back immediately.

"All my customers said that, 'Well, that's not enough, man, and, well, we need more,'" Tae-won said Friday.

The chairman expressed confidence that demand for memory has structurally shifted away from the boom-bust cycles that have historically plagued the industry. Tae-won cited AI agents and physical AI robots as emerging drivers, saying those systems require significant memory resources. "The demand is enormous, exponentially, so I don't really see" signs that HBM demand is shrinking, he said.

SK Hynix's planned expansion is concentrated primarily in South Korea, where the company is developing a cluster of chip fabrication plants in Yongin at a projected cost of $390 billion. In the United States, the company has announced a $4 billion advanced packaging facility in Indiana.

The Nasdaq listing arrives roughly a month after Elon Musk's SpaceX went public in what was described as the largest initial public offering on record, reflecting a broader moment of renewed enthusiasm for large-scale tech listings.

The debut also comes amid a broader debate about whether AI-driven memory demand will sustain itself or eventually mirror the oversupply cycles triggered by past technology booms — including the dot-com era, the smartphone wave, and the cloud transition.

For now, SK Hynix is betting that the AI era represents a durable departure from those precedents, and Friday's market reception suggests at least some investors share that view.

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