SK Hynix rose 13% in its first day of trading on the Nasdaq, closing at $168.01, as American investors jumped at the chance to acquire a stake in South Korea’s second most valuable company.
The stock trades under the ticker symbol SKHYV, and will switch to SKHY from Tuesday. The stock opened at $170 and declined during trading on Friday.
The company’s American depositary receipts, or ADRs, worth $149, have raised $26.5 billion through its aggressive expansion plans, which include investing in new plants and equipment.
“It’s kind of a dream, and now it’s a dream,” SK Hynix Chairman Chey Tae-won told CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos on Friday.
SK Hynix is second only to Samsung in market value in its home country. Like its biggest competitor, the company makes computer memory, which is used by phones and PCs to store temporary data. SK Hynix’s client list includes big names in technology, such as Nvidia again an apple.
Memory, for decades, was placed in a sleepy corner of the semiconductor world, but the boom in artificial intelligence has turned it into a huge growth market.
Tae-win told CNBC that when he meets with customers and colleagues, everyone expects more chips. He said even when SK Hynix announced that they would double their load in five years, customers said they still needed more.
“All my clients say, ‘That’s not enough, man, and we need more,'” Tae-won said Friday.
SK Hynix’s valuation has risen more than sevenfold in the past year as demand for AI infrastructure has fueled a shortage of computer memory and sent prices soaring.
SK Hynix is a leader in high-performance memory used in AI chips from Nvidia, the world’s most important company. Compared to the RAM of phones or laptops, AI chips require high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, created through a complex process that involves stacking multiple layers of traditional memory together.
“Demand is great, it’s growing, so I don’t really see” signs that demand for HBM is slowing down, Tae-won said.
Betting on memory development has proven risky due to the cyclical nature of the business. Major technological changes such as the dot-com frenzy, the growth of smartphones, or the transition from embedded software to the cloud have brought about a greater demand for memory to run new devices. That often leads to overbuying, followed by a drop in prices.
Anxiety is rife today given the growth of AI. But Tae-won said SK Hynix is convinced that demand for memory has changed forever from previous boom-bust cycles.
“It’s an AI agent, a physical AI robot, which actually requires a lot of memory chips,” Tae-won said.
Some of that HBM will be packaged in the US after the company announced an upgraded $4 billion packaging plant in Indiana. But most of SK Hynix’s planned expansion in the coming years will take place in South Korea. That includes a cluster of Yongin chip manufacturing plants that will be worth $390 billion.
SK Hynix’s listing comes about a month after Elon Musk’s SpaceX it went public in the largest initial public offering on record.
WATCH: SK Hynix to raise $28 billion in Nasdaq listing
