SK Hynix eyes $28B Nasdaq listing — one of the largest-ever US offerings by an Asian company

SK Hynix is raising $28 billion on Nasdaq this week — one of the largest US listings by an Asian company ever.

The South Korean memory chip maker is already public in Seoul, where its stock has climbed more than 750% over the past year. The Nasdaq listing makes the company accessible to American investors. Situational Awareness, the hedge fund run by Leopold Aschenbrenner, is participating alongside Bally Gifford. Together, the firms could take as much as $7 billion of the deal.

SK Hynix has positioned itself as one of the purest AI infrastructure plays. It leads in HBM (high-bandwidth memory), has become a key Nvidia partner, and trades at a market cap around $1.1 trillion won.

The valuation disconnect

The numbers look dominant: 2025 revenue grew 47% to $63 billion. Profit more than doubled to $28 billion. Q1 2026 revenue tripled year over year. Yet the stock trades at just 7x forward earnings — a discount rooted in skepticism about memory chip cycles.

Investors who lived through smartphone booms, cloud buildouts, and crypto binges have seen this story before. Memory markets boom, then bust. The concern now is whether the current AI demand surge will follow the same pattern. If AI infrastructure buildout accelerates further, will SK Hynix face competitive pressure that stalls growth? Or is this genuinely a different cycle? Many memory investors are pattern-matching to history rather than treating AI as a structural shift.

That uncertainty explains why a company with this trajectory trades at a single-digit multiple. It should still be a blockbuster offering.