South Korean computer chip maker SK Hynix has raised $26.5 billion (£19.8 billion) in its New York share offering, the biggest listing ever by a foreign firm in the US.
The company, a major supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant Nvidia, said on Thursday it has sold 177.9 million American depositary shares at $149 per share. Trading of the shares is scheduled to begin on Nasdaq on Friday.
SK Hynix saw its market value top $1 trillion in its home country in May, boosted by a surge in demand for AI chips.
Its share price in South Korea has more than tripled this year, which along with Samsung Electronics has helped boost the benchmark Kospi index by more than 70% over the same period.
SK Hynix is one of the world’s leading memory chip manufacturers. Hundreds of billions spent on AI have given a big boost to the industry.
Shares of rivals Samsung Electronics and Micron have more than doubled in recent months.
The U.S. listing gives SK Hynix easy access to large amounts of potential investment from the world’s largest economy, which has lower barriers to entry than South Korea, said Jaewon Choi, a finance professor at Seoul National University.
Choi said traders were closely watching the listing as a “scale to test the waters” on whether investor enthusiasm for memory chip makers will continue.
AI boom has increased the crowd of companies raising money in the stock market.
In June, GrokAI owner SpaceX raised $85.7 billion in what became the world’s largest listing ever.
Meanwhile, AI developers Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing to go public with a valuation of more than $1 trillion.
