SK hynix, the world’s second largest memory maker and the leading supplier of high bandwidth memory for AI accelerators, is preparing an American depositary receipt listing in the United States that reports value at up to 27 billion dollars. A deal of that size would be the largest US listing ever by a Korean company, exceeding the debuts that took Coupang and others to New York.
The strategic logic connects to the company’s other headline this week. SK hynix is negotiating the terms of its US manufacturing expansion against the licence regime governing its Chinese plants, a story this site has followed in the Solidigm file, and a US listing would give it a dollar equity currency, a US shareholder base and a valuation benchmarked against Micron rather than against the Korea discount.
Memory is the AI trade’s most cyclical asset, and HBM pricing has risen sharply on data centre demand. Listing at the top of the cycle is good treasury management and a statement about how long management thinks the cycle runs; the filing, when it comes, will be read for exactly that signal.