SK Hynix on Thursday priced the biggest U.S. share sale ever by a foreign company, raising $26.5 billion in a Nasdaq listing that begins trading Friday and testing whether global appetite for the memory chips that feed artificial intelligence has any room left. The South Korean chipmaker sold 177.9 million American depositary shares at $149 apiece in an offering that drew about $171 billion in orders and was more than seven times oversubscribed.

The deal surpassed Alibaba's $25 billion debut in 2014 as the largest listing by a foreign firm in U.S. history and ranks second globally in 2026 only to SpaceX's $85.7 billion offering in June. For Wall Street, the pricing puts a number on a rotation already underway: money flowing out of the Magnificent Seven megacap names that led the AI trade for two years and into the memory, foundry and materials companies that supply them.

The pricing

Each American depositary share is equivalent to a tenth of a Seoul-traded common share, SK Hynix said, and the 177.9 million ADSs together represent about 18 million ordinary shares. Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the deal, reported that orders ran more than seven times the available supply.

"Seven times oversubscribed, about $171bn in orders for a $24-28bn deal, and this happened while the semiconductor sector was actively selling off and the Kospi was in a circuit breaker week," said Dilin Wu, a research strategist at Pepperstone in Melbourne. Wu said the pricing cleared a signal that "the AI memory cycle is real, the earnings are real, and global capital has simply never had easy access to the best pure memory play in the space."

Behind the demand

SK Hynix, a key memory supplier to Nvidia, reported first-quarter net income of 40.34 trillion won, or $26.6 billion — roughly the same figure it raised in Thursday's share sale. Its Seoul-listed shares have risen about 229 percent since Jan. 1 and topped a $1 trillion market value in May, joining Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology in the elite memory-maker club. Samsung and Micron shares have more than doubled in recent months, the BBC reported.

The chip rally has swept in South Korea's benchmark Kospi index, which is up more than 70 percent in 2026. Seoul-listed SK Hynix shares added 0.8 percent Friday morning in Korea as the U.S. pricing was announced. Alex Holmes, regional director for Asia Pacific at the Economist Intelligence Unit, told Al Jazeera the trade is moving up the AI supply chain. "Within tech, the [Magnificent Seven] have underperformed, and growth has instead concentrated in the semiconductor supply chain. In the US that's firms like Micron … In Asia, SK Hynix and Samsung have been big winners," Holmes said.

Picks and shovels

The rotation has bruised the megacap names that dominated the AI trade in 2024 and 2025. The Magnificent Seven — Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Apple and Tesla — traded at their lowest level in a decade this week relative to the benchmark S&P 500 index, Morgan Stanley told clients. Investors are wagering that even if hyperscaler capital spending eases, the firms selling the picks and shovels — high-bandwidth memory, wafer gear, chip chemicals — will capture the near-term margin.

SK Hynix's listing lands amid a wave of AI-fueled offerings. SpaceX's $85.7 billion Nasdaq debut in June set the global IPO record, and OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing public listings at valuations above $1 trillion each, the BBC reported. Seoul National University finance professor Jaewon Choi told the BBC traders will treat SK Hynix's Nasdaq debut as a "yardstick to test the water" for whether investor enthusiasm for memory chip makers holds.

Not every buyer in the book is a true believer. Cameron Robertson, a portfolio manager at Platinum Asset Management in Sydney, told Al Jazeera he sees "a mix of genuine confidence and speculative activity" in the AI trade, pointing to "the rapid growth in margin lending" in South Korea and "the rise in popularity of single stock levered ETFs." Hanyang University business professor Yun Youngjin told the BBC the Nasdaq listing carries its own risk — that capital could rotate out of Seoul and toward the U.S., hollowing out the market that lifted SK Hynix in the first place. No U.S. institutional short-seller surfaced in Thursday's coverage.

The Korean government is betting the other way. SK Hynix and Samsung have both signed on to a $1 trillion AI investment initiative unveiled last month by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, pledging $518 billion with suppliers to build two chipmaking facilities. Friday's opening bell on Nasdaq will show whether U.S. investors are ready to help pay for them.