Demand for artificial intelligence drives South Korea's SK Hynix to list in the U.S. Major financing of US$28 billion was oversubscribed
The construction of global artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure has given rise to new trends in the capital market. According to reports, global semiconductor giant, South Korea's SK Hynix (SK Hynix) plans to issue American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) worth approximately US$28 billion in the United States. Despite facing a record financing scale and the recent retracement of global technology stocks, the project has been oversubscribed several times on the eve of pricing, demonstrating the strong demand from global long-term capital and technology investors for the underlying assets of the artificial intelligence hardware supply chain. According to the publicly disclosed issuance plan, SK Hynix officially launched 177.9 million American depositary receipts to global investors on Monday. Each depositary receipt represents one-tenth of a share of Korean local ordinary shares, and the overall size accounts for approximately 2.5% of the company's total market value. The relevant pricing procedures are expected to be completed on Thursday and officially launched on Friday. Global Select Market (Nasdaq Global Select Market), the stock code is "SKHY". The offering was sponsored by BofA Securities, Citigroup, Joint underwriting by other international mainstream investment banks is expected to set a record for non-U.S. overseas companies listing and financing in the U.S. capital market. Market analysis points out that as the demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips in artificial intelligence servers has exploded, SK Hynix, as a core supplier in this field, has achieved a historic jump in its corporate valuation during the year. In the management global roadshow held recently, a total of about 1,000 institutional investors such as sovereign wealth funds and global long-term funds participated in the subscription. Investment institutions generally believe that due to the institutional conversion between Korean local common stocks and depositary receipts issued in the United States, arbitrage space is limited. It is expected that these assets listed in the United States will most likely maintain a premium trading status in the future. The South Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) closed down more than 5% on Wednesday due to the recent valuation calibration of the global semiconductor sector and the broader market. The share price of SK Hynix's common stock on the Seoul Exchange also fell by nearly 3% that day, but the overall performance was still significantly resilient and outperformed the market. Industry analysts emphasize that the capacity expansion of strategic hardware such as high-bandwidth memory is capital-intensive competition. The huge amount of funds raised by SK Hynix through its overseas listing will be mainly used for the construction of its local advanced wafer fab and cutting-edge packaging production lines. This marks that the global artificial intelligence industry chain is accelerating from the early "concept-driven" to the deep-water area of "capacity implementation and equipment realization".