#SKHynixRecordIPO
Yesterday we asked whether the market's appetite for the AI memory trade would hold at size. The book just answered, and it did not blink.
SK Hynix priced its ADR offering at $149, below the ~$165 floated earlier in the week, yet still raised about $26.5B. That locks in the largest foreign listing in US history, surpassing Alibaba's 2014 record, and ranks as the second-largest US IPO ever, behind only SpaceX.
The demand was overwhelming:
· Subscription interest approaching $200B
· More than 7x oversubscribed, with Baillie Gifford and Coatue in the book
· Priced at a ~3% premium to the Seoul close
· Pre-trading opens today as SKHYV, converting to SKHY on July 13
Here is a detail few are flagging: the deal carries no greenshoe. For a debut this size, that means no underwriter safety net to smooth out the first few sessions, so price discovery will be raw in both directions.
And the moat is not uncontested. Samsung began mass-producing HBM4 back in February, and all three of SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron have now qualified for Nvidia's next-gen Vera Rubin platform. The lead is real, but the gap is closing.
The frenzy is already spilling into retail structure. Leveraged long and short products are lined up to launch July 13, before the stock even trades regular-way. When 2x long and short vehicles show up this early, you know the crowd has arrived.
The spillover hit markets fast. The debut helped fuel an overnight chip rally, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index climbing and Arm closing up 9.2%. AI risk appetite and crypto risk appetite tend to rhyme, and when money chases the AI trade this hard, that risk-on mood often reaches BTC and the majors too.
But the whole thing rests on one assumption: that AI capex keeps climbing. Cool that down, and HBM demand, and a lot of this euphoria, cools with it.
So when AI money moves this fast, do you see it spilling into crypto, or staying parked in chip stocks?
#SKHynixRecordIPO
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