Funds continue to flock to the "Silicon Inflation" theme! HBM's dominant SK hynix American Depositary Receipt receives more than 7 times oversubscription.

Some media reports cited informed sources as revealing that as South Korean storage chip manufacturing giant SK Hynix Inc. prepares to price a large-scale issuance of its American Depositary Receipts (ADR) on the US stock market on Thursday, its latest US listing has received more than seven times oversubscription, once again igniting the "silicon-based inflation" bonanza. According to informed sources, the sale of 177.9 million ADRs has attracted institutional investor demand, including global long-only funds, tech-focused hedge funds, major sovereign wealth funds, and top investment institutions focused on the Asian market. According to a listing filing submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), each SK Hynix ADR issued is equivalent to one-tenth of a share of the company's common stock. Based on Wednesday's closing price on the Seoul stock market of 207.6 million Korean won (1,380 US dollars) per share, institutional estimates suggest that this US issuance will raise approximately 24.5 billion US dollars, lower than the initial target of around 29.4 billion US dollars. It is important to note that, as the total ADR issuance remains unchanged, this downward adjustment is purely due to fluctuations in stock prices, not a signal of the company's intention to actively reduce financing. Based on this scale, according to institutional data compiled, this issuance will rank among the largest ADR debuts by a foreign company in the US stock market, second only to the approximately 25 billion US dollar debut of Chinese cloud computing and e-commerce leader Alibaba Group Holding Limited Sponsored ADR at the time. SK Hynix is actively seeking to raise a substantial amount of funds through listing and trading on the US stock market to expand its storage chip production capacity, taking advantage of the strong demand from global investors for the stocks of super-giant companies in the semiconductor industry that have seen skyrocketing prices in recent years and have become extremely scarce. SK Hynix's plan to list in the US has attracted a surge of capital, combined with the incredible performance and outlook just announced by US memory giant Micron Technology, Inc., underscoring that the super cycle in storage chips is far from over. SK Hynix's plan to raise around 29.4 billion US dollars through the US listing and Micron's latest "performance + guidance" double-hit combination significantly strengthens a firm market view that the so-called "storage super cycle" is far from over, but has evolved from the traditional PC/smartphone cycle to a structural scarcity super cycle dominated by AI data centers. Micron is validating the real demand strength on the demand side, while SK Hynix is validating the enthusiasm from the capital side, highlighting that global investors are still willing to pay premium prices for the "storage chip supply bottleneck." Sources have said that discussions are ongoing and details of the US listing may change. An SK Hynix spokesperson declined to comment. Amid the US stock market ADR issuance, the share prices of SK Hynix listed in South Korea and competitors such as Micron Technology, Inc. have plummeted in recent days. This is mainly due to the extremely crowded and highly leveraged long positions in the South Korean stock market, leading to a cooling of the frenzied sentiment around the bet on AI computing power infrastructure. SK Hynix's stock price fell by 5.7% on Wednesday in South Korea, now down by 30% from its record high at the end of June, although it is still three times higher than at the beginning of the year. Leading Wall Street investment banks expected to stop accepting orders for the SK Hynix ADR issuance at 4 p.m. local time on Wednesday. The issuance is led by Wall Street giants Bank of America Corp, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., and JPMorgan Chase, with nine other institutions also participating. SK Hynix has received strong subscription intentions from top global investment institutions such as Baillie Gifford, Coatue Management, and Situational Awareness Partners, with a subscription size of up to 7 billion US dollars for this issuance of ADR. The company and its long-standing rival Samsung Electronics are preparing to increase their investment in South Korea under the government-led and highly valued 880 billion US dollar local investment promotion framework, focusing on AI data center construction and expanding storage chip production capacity. These ADRs are scheduled to begin pre-trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market with the ADR code "SKHYV" on Friday; when they begin regular trading on July 13, the trading code will change to "SKHY." The king of HBM rides the wave of AI frenzy to list in the US and raise funds, with global capital betting heavily on "silicon-based inflation" SK Hynix is the core supplier of high-bandwidth memory, i.e., HBM storage systems, to AI chip leaders like NVIDIA Corporation. This US listing plan also marks a milestone in SK Hynix's extraordinary rise. After becoming the preferred HBM supplier to the AI chip superpower NVIDIA Corporation, it is now the world's largest supplier of HBM market share. This has temporarily surpassed its long-standing South Korean rival and global giant in memory chip manufacturing, Samsung Electronics, in market value and overall DRAM share. Whether it's Alphabet Inc.'s massive TPU AI compute cluster, or NVIDIA Corporation's massive AI GPU compute cluster, all rely on high-bandwidth memory systems that are crucial for AI chips. In addition, the rapid establishment or expansion of AI data centers by tech giants has driven the need for large-scale purchases of server-level DDR5 memory and enterprise-grade high-performance SSD/HDD. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology, Inc. are all focused on three core areas in the storage market: HBM, high-performance server DRAM (including DDR5/LPDDR5X), and high-end data center-grade SSDs, making them the most direct beneficiaries in the "AI memory + storage stack" and seizing the "super dividends" of AI infrastructure investment boom. Samsung Electronics, headquartered in South Korea, has just unveiled its unparalleled preliminary Q2 performance, which is perhaps the most direct profit sample of this ongoing super cycle in storage chips. Operating profit soared about 19 times year-on-year in the April-June period this year, expected to reach 89.4 trillion Korean won (approximately 58.4 billion US dollars), once again breaking quarterly records with a 56% increase from the previous quarter. Revenue for the same period is expected to reach 171 trillion Korean won, exceeding market estimates of 169.2 trillion Korean won and a 129% increase from the same period last year. The company plans to announce complete financial results on July 30, when it will disclose net profit and business segment data. Samsung Electronics' quarterly operating profit has surpassed NVIDIA Corporation's previous quarter's 53.536 billion US dollars (approximately 8.2 trillion Korean won) of operating profit, making it the company with the highest quarterly operating profit globally. Statistics and forecasts compiled by TrendForce reveal the structural strength of the price surge in storage chips driven by the AI infrastructure boom: in the first quarter of 2026, contract prices for traditional DRAM rose by approximately 93% to 98% quarter-on-quarter, driving an 81% increase in DRAM industry revenue to 97 billion US dollars; the organization also predicts a further 58% to 63% increase in contract prices for traditional DRAM in the second quarter of 2026, with NAND Flash contract prices rising by 70% to 75%; in the third quarter of 2026, the contract prices of traditional DRAM products are expected to rise by a further 13% to 18% on a record basis, and NAND flash contract prices may increase by 10% to 15%, indicating that storage component suppliers are continuing to shift capacity to AI server-related compute clusters, with more NAND capacity being allocated to enterprise-level SSD demands for data center construction. Since the beginning of this year, global capital has been embracing the grand investment narrative of "searching for silicon-based inflation and weakening carbon-based assets," fundamentally shifting focus from traditional manufacturing, automotive, consumer goods, real estate, energy, and other sectors that rely on population, resources, and linear economic growth to the high-end manufacturing chain surrounding silicon chips related to AI computing infrastructure. This is not just a narrative of chasing tech stocks, but a story of global capital repricing the "most core carrier of future growth": whoever controls the AI computing infrastructure resources related to AI training/inference, commands a higher valuation premium, and reallocates capital weights relatively from old economy assets dependent on population, oil/gas, real estate, and consumer cycles to infrastructure assets capable of supporting the expansion of AI training/inference and automated physical AI production. The core logic behind the global capital's embrace of "silicon-based inflation" in the current AI era undoubtedly lies in the fact that the scarcest resources are not traditional labor, real estate, or general production and manufacturing capacity, but rather GPU/ASIC, HBM/DRAM/NAND storage chips, data center CPU components, high-performance Ethernet infrastructure, advanced packaging capacity, EUV and other cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing equipment, data center power chain, and data center optical interconnection/communication, which are all "silicon-based production materials." UBS Group AG is betting on premium trading of SK Hynix ADRs: buying US stocks ADRs, selling Seoul stocks, opening arbitrage window for AI storage super leader It is reported that the issuance of American Depositary Receipts (ADR) in the US stock market by SK Hynix is taking place after the company's stock has risen by about 850% over the past 12 months on the Seoul stock market, pushing the company's market value to over 1 trillion US dollars, surpassing South Korea's long-standing largest market capitalization company, Samsung Electronics, at one point. As positions become more crowded and leveraged strategies grow larger, investor sentiment around semiconductor companies linked to AI computing infrastructure has been fluctuating recently, with significant ups and downs in the overall uptrend since the beginning of the year.