South Korean memory chipmaker SK Hynix, rival to Samsung and U.S.-based Micron, is planning to sell nearly 17.8 million shares in a U.S. IPO, the company said on Monday. Should its shares sell well (and there’s indication that they will), the company could raise around $28 billion, based on SK Hynix’s closing share price last Friday in Seoul, Bloomberg reports.
SK Hynix will be offering American depositary receipts (ADRs), a type of certificate that lets U.S. investors buy a foreign stock without trading directly on an overseas exchange. Each ADR will represent a tenth of a common share. It is expected to price those securities on Thursday and begin trading on Friday.
Like Micron, SK Hynix is riding an AI-fueled boom credited to AI in both sales and stock price. Its first-quarter revenues were up nearly 200% over the same quarter last year, it said, and its stock is up about 260% so far this year. This is because systems that run AI are very memory intensive. As hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle race to build out so-called AI factories, and as new AI data centers multiply nationwide, demand has outpaced supply, creating a shortage of memory chips — including high-bandwidth memory (HBM), DRAM, and NAND (the different types of chips that store and move data inside AI systems). The situation has been called “RAMageddon.” Apple executives said the shortage is forcing it to raise prices on Mac computers and iPads.
