SK Hynix, South Korea's most valuable company, plans to raise up to $29.4B through a Nasdaq listing of American depositary receipts, with trading targeted to begin July 10.

The company filed plans to issue 17.79M new shares worth roughly 45.45 trillion won.

BofA Securities, Citigroup Global Markets, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Securities are managing the offering.

The AI Memory Trade

SK Hynix said it expects the ADR listing to expand its investor base and allow its "true corporate value to be properly evaluated."

The company controls roughly 60% of the global high-bandwidth memory market by revenue, according to Counterpoint Research. Samsung Electronics and MicronMU

each hold roughly 21%.

HBM chips are a critical component in AI data centers, used in systems built by NvidiaNVDA

and Google, among others.

Shares of SK Hynix have surged roughly 300% this year, pushing its market cap above $1T and making it the second South Korean company to cross that threshold after Samsung.

"If they can get at least a valuation multiple similar to Micron, then the local shares also need to reflect that," said Sanjeev Rana, Senior Analyst at CLSA.

Proceeds from the offering will go toward building new chip factories in South Korea and purchasing chipmaking equipment, including extreme ultraviolet lithography machines from ASMLASML

.

The comeback story

SK Hynix's rise is one of the more unlikely in the semiconductor industry. The company was formed from a government-led merger of LG Semiconductor and Hyundai Electronics after South Korea's 1997 financial crisis.

It struggled for years, and in 2002 Micron made an offer to acquire its memory assets that was rebuffed. SK Group eventually took over the business in 2011.

The company's early bet on HBM technology changed its trajectory, letting it leapfrog Samsung in a market where supply shortages are expected to last for years, according to FTSE Russell's global head of investment research.

SK Hynix is also building a $4B chip packaging plant in Indiana, its first US facility, alongside a massive new fabrication campus in South Korea set to begin coming online in 2027.

The ADR listing size nearly doubled from an initial plan reported in March to raise as much as $14B, a sign of how sharply investor appetite has grown alongside the AI buildout.