HBM super hegemon SK Hynix is about to land on the US stock market! A $29.4 billion financing wave sets off a "silicon-based inflation" frenzy.

One of the three largest global memory chip original manufacturers headquartered in South Korea, also a memory chip giant with the highest market share in the HBM field - SK Hynix Inc., has submitted a registration statement (amended version) on Form F-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), planning to list its stock for trading on the NASDAQ stock market in the U.S. The company plans to list its American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) with the ADR code "SKHY" on the U.S. stock market, which represents a portion of the company's common stock in the South Korean stock market that is not disclosed. Each ADS represents a part of the company's common stock in South Korea with a face value of 5000 Korean won and listed on the KOSPI market of the Korea Exchange. In this latest filing, the company stated that on June 24th, its board of directors resolved that the maximum number of newly issued common shares related to this offering is 17.79 million shares, accounting for approximately 2.50% of the total outstanding common shares of around 712.702 million shares as of the date of the resolution. The company plans to use the net proceeds from this offering for a 45.5 trillion Korean won capital expenditure related to the significant capacity expansion of memory chip production facilities in South Korea. The company also plans to use the funds to purchase expensive EUV lithography machines, with an estimated cost of about 1.19 trillion Korean won, and expects to receive bulk deliveries by December 2027. SK Hynix also expects to use operating cash flows, existing and future credit limits and borrowings under certain debt securities, as well as other sources of financing, to provide funding for the construction of major capacity expansion infrastructure and the amount needed for procurement beyond the net proceeds from this offering in the U.S. stock market. Wall Street financial giants such as Bank of America Corp, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., and JPMorgan Chase & Co. will serve as the global coordinators for this large IPO. The company announced last week that it expects its stock to begin trading on the U.S. stock market on July 10th. The company is seeking to raise 45.45 trillion Korean won (approximately $294 billion) through this listing. HBM King goes to the U.S. for IPO financing, global funds heavily bet on "silicon-based inflation" Based on the proposed fundraising and issuance scale, depending on the exchange rate, SK Hynix's ADR issuance in the U.S. stock market is expected to rank among the top three largest IPOs in global stock market history. According to data compiled by institutions, it will be comparable to Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion super IPO in 2019, and the largest IPO globally is SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, with an unparalleled fundraising scale of at least $75 billion. SK Hynix is the core supplier of high-bandwidth memory, namely HBM storage systems, to AI chip leaders such as NVIDIA Corporation. The U.S. listing plan also marks a milestone in SK Hynix's remarkable rise. After becoming the preferred HBM supplier for NVIDIA Corporation, the global leader in AI chips, it has become the largest supplier of HBM market share in the world. This has temporarily pushed its market value and overall DRAM share beyond its long-time Korean competitor, Samsung Electronics. The issuance of American depositary receipts (ADRs) in the U.S. stock market for SK Hynix comes after its stock in Seoul has surged by approximately 850% in the past 12 months, pushing its market value to over $1 trillion, surpassing Samsung Electronics, the largest market cap company in South Korea. As positions become more crowded and leverage strategies grow, investors' sentiment towards semiconductor companies related to AI processing infrastructure has been fluctuating recently, with significant volatility in their overall performance this year. SK Hynix's plans to raise approximately $294 billion through its U.S. listing, combined with Micron Technology Inc.'s strong performance and outlook, highlight that the super cycle for memory chips is far from over. The core significance of SK Hynix's listing in the U.S. may not just be about raising funds, but about moving the HBM leader from the discounted valuation framework of the Korean cyclical stocks to the pricing system for AI processing infrastructure assets in the U.S. As described above, SK Hynix's U.S. listing plan and the strong demand for its ADRs from global investors validate the enthusiasm from investors, emphasizing that they are willing to pay a premium for the "memory chip supply bottleneck." SK Hynix, along with NVIDIA Corporation, Alphabet Inc. Class C, and other high-bandwidth memory (HBM) core suppliers for AI systems, may see an increase in their valuation multiples in the U.S. stock market, similar to companies like Micron. From an industrial engineering perspective, HBM is no longer just a regular storage accessory but a key constraint in determining GPU/ASIC cluster throughput, power efficiency, and inference concurrency; SK Hynix's U.S. fundraising is aimed at securing the rights to memory bandwidth supply in advance during the AI processing shortage era. Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.'s June survey of the DRAM market revealed that the pricing power of HBM is being re-anchored by the scarcity of traditional DRAM. DDR5 spot prices have risen by 20% since May 1st, with a premium of 25% over May contract prices; DDR4 prices have risen by 11% during the same period, with premiums as high as 45%, indicating that the spot market is significantly outpacing the contract market, and there is still upward pressure on contract prices. More importantly, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. has raised its forecast for Samsung's 2027 HBM prices from a year-on-year increase of +14% to +44%, taking into account the tight supply and demand for HBM, as well as the widening price differential between traditional DRAM and HBM, indicating potential upward risks in the forecast. South Korea's exports of DRAM in May increased by 21% on a monthly basis and 370% year-on-year, while the combined revenues of server Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) companies in Taiwan China increased by 53% year-on-year, and the world's largest server BMC chip supplier, Aspeed, saw a 69% year-on-year revenue increase. This illustrates that the recent increase in memory prices is not simply due to replenishing inventory but a systematic tension caused by the construction of AI GPU rack-level servers, AI ASIC servers, HBM packaging, and reallocation of traditional DRAM supply. In other words, the logic behind the rising HBM prices is not isolated but the result of the memory layer in AI data centers transitioning from a "capacity resource" to a "bandwidth resource, power resource, and delivery resource" in the face of high demand. In addition, the Wall Street financial giant Bernstein has significantly raised its target price for SanDisk to $3000, indicating that the valuation logic for NAND storage chips is also undergoing significant changes: the market is no longer only looking at short-term NAND spot prices but starting to reprice the cash flow visibility and downside protection brought by long-term supply contracts (LTA). Bernstein has raised the target price for SanDisk from $1700 to $3000 and maintained an outperform rating. Bernstein states that the new generation of LTAs differs from the historical "supply guarantee" agreements that favored customers by introducing fixed prices or price ranges, customer financing commitments or financial guarantees, and 3 to 5-year contract terms, allowing storage manufacturers to gain stronger profit buffers during price declines for the first time. According to Bernstein's latest stress test, if 60% of SanDisk's shipments are covered by LTAs, even if NAND prices plummet by 72% from the peak to $0.11/GB, EPS for the fiscal year 2030 could still reach $214, compared to around $81 without LTA protection. Furthermore, even with extreme ASP pressure at $0.06/GB in fiscal year 2030, 60-80% LTA coverage could still support a composite ASP of $0.19 to $0.24/GB and a gross margin of over 80%. These latest market dynamics indicate that AI data centers are reevaluating the "scarcity pricing power" of DRAM/HBM and the "contract cash flow attributes" of NAND: the cycles will not disappear, but the long-term undervaluation, high volatility, and purely commoditized labels of memory chip manufacturers are being significantly weakened by the AI data center construction process and the nearly endless need for AI processing resources and long-term locking price contracts. Samsung and SK Hynix stock prices hitting historical highs show no signs of stopping? Nomura Securities is currently the most bullish large financial institutions on the memory chip sector. In a recent research report, Nomura raised its target price for Samsung Electronics from 340,000 Korean won to 590,000 Korean won and for SK Hynix from 2,340,000 Korean won to 4,000,000 Korean won, implying potential upside of approximately 118% and 120% respectively. Nomura's core bullish logic is that AI has transformed storage from a traditional PC/mobile cycle product into a long-term growth asset for data centers: intelligent AI inference requires a massive key-value cache (KV Cache), and the supply of HBM significantly lags behind demand; it expects global data center capital expenditure to increase from $1.16 trillion last year to $6.13 trillion in 2030, with the share of memory in data center investments expected to increase from the current 9% to 23%. Therefore, Samsung and SK Hynix appear significantly undervalued at around 6 times their forward 12-month price-to-earnings ratio compared to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd., providing room for revaluation towards a valuation system of around 20 times. Whether it's Alphabet Inc. Class C's massive TPU AI processing cluster or NVIDIA Corporation's immense AI GPU processing cluster, they both rely on integrated HBM storage systems containing AI chips. The accelerated construction or expansion of AI data centers by tech giants necessitates the large-scale procurement of server-grade DDR5 memory and enterprise-level high-performance SSDs/HDDs; Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology, Inc. are all key players in these three core memory areas: HBM, server high-performance DRAM (including DDR5/LPDDR5X), and high-end data center-grade SSDs, making them the most directly benefiting forces in the "AI memory + storage stack," enjoying the "super dividends" of the AI infrastructure wave. GPUs handle intelligence, HBM/DRAM handle high-speed feeding, enterprise-level NAND/eSSD handle hot data and cache, and HDDs handle long-term retention of huge amounts of cold/warm data. Therefore, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. and other Wall Street financial giants believe that the AI processing arms race led by cloud computing giants is transforming memory chips from cyclical products into strategic scarce assets, with the increasing memory prices in 2026 not being the end but possibly just the beginning of a super cycle. A recent study by the well-known semiconductor industry research firm SemiAnalysis shows that although Chinese DRAM storage giant Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC) will maintain one of the fastest expansion paces globally in the coming years, SemiAnalysis does not believe this will change the overall tight supply situation in the DRAM market. On the contrary, the group believes that the ongoing construction of AI servers, high-performance computing, and cloud computing infrastructure is continually driving up storage demand, while the release of new capacity is still struggling to keep up with growth. According to SemiAnalysis' calculations, even if the expansion plans of YMTC, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are all taken into account, the global DRAM market is still expected to face a high single-digit supply gap in 2026; by 2027, this supply demand gap may even further expand to low to mid double-digit levels. Based on this assessment, the research firm expects the tight supply situation in the DRAM market to continue until around 2028. In other words, even with the rapid rise and ongoing expansion of YMTC, it is difficult to fundamentally reverse the industry's supply-demand imbalance, which is also the key logic behind SemiAnalysis' continuous optimism towards DRAM prices and the overall prosperity cycle of the HBM/DRAM/NAND storage industry.