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Shares of South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix jumped nearly 13% on Thursday, after it announced plans to raise about $29.4 billion by listing its shares in the US, one of the biggest stock offerings ever.
Earlier this week, the company also overtook Samsung to become South Korea's most valuable company, with a market value of $1.35 trillion.
If the US listing goes ahead at the proposed size, it would rank among the three largest stock market debuts in history, matching Saudi Aramco's record-breaking $29.4 billion IPO in 2019.
What does the company actually do: SK Hynix makes the memory chips that power everything from your smartphone and laptop to AI tools like ChatGPT and the massive data centres behind them. Its biggest strength is making high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in Nvidia's AI processors, helping AI models train faster and deliver quicker responses.
The bigger picture: the market for DRAM (the temporary memory that helps your phone, laptop and AI systems run apps and process data quickly) is expected to grow from $124 billion in 2026 to over $248 billion by 2031, expanding at a strong 14.9% annually. That growth is being fuelled by AI data centres, smartphones, connected cars and cloud computing, although export restrictions on advanced chips to China and manufacturing incentives in the US and Europe could reshape where these chips are produced.
Market reaction: the optimism spread well beyond SK Hynix. The entire South Korean semiconductor sector rallied after US chipmaker Micron issued a stronger-than-expected sales forecast, reinforcing confidence that AI-driven demand is far from slowing down.
Samsung Electronics climbed 6.5%, helping lift South Korea's Kospi Index 6% in a single day and nearly 10% in just two trading sessions. The surge was so strong that the stock exchange briefly paused automated buy orders for five minutes to cool excessive market volatility.
