SK Hynix filed a Form F-1 registration statement with the U.S. SEC and is targeting approximately $28 billion through an ADR listing on Nasdaq, with pricing expected on Friday, July 10, 2026, according to Reuters and Bloomberg.

The mechanics: this is a primary offering of 17.79 million new shares, each one packaged as an American Depositary Receipt — or ADR. An ADR is a dollar-denominated certificate that represents ownership in the underlying Korean shares already trading on the Korea Exchange. The board took formal action on June 24, 2026. The legal paperwork is filed. Pricing happens Friday.

If the deal prices at or near $28 billion, it becomes the largest-ever U.S. listing by a foreign company, outpacing Alibaba's 2014 NYSE debut, per Bloomberg. That size reflects both SK Hynix's existing market value and the premium that equity markets have attached to companies exposed to High Bandwidth Memory — the specialized memory chip that powers Nvidia's latest AI processors.

Why Nasdaq? SK Hynix is the dominant supplier of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), the stacked-memory architecture inside Nvidia's H100, H200, and Blackwell GPUs. Demand for HBM has consistently exceeded supply since large AI models began scaling. A Nasdaq listing opens the door to vast U.S. institutional capital — pension funds, endowments, and asset managers hold outsized allocations to AI infrastructure themes. It also removes friction: index funds and active managers in the U.S. face operational hurdles trading on the Korea Exchange. And it raises the company's profile with American customers and investors who already depend on SK Hynix's chips but had no clean way to own equity in the company.

This is new equity, not a sale by existing holders. The $28 billion flows to SK Hynix's balance sheet, not to SK Telecom or other current shareholders. At that scale, the proceeds can materially accelerate capacity expansion. HBM manufacturing is brutally capital-intensive — it demands extreme ultraviolet lithography and through-silicon via stacking at volumes that only a handful of factories globally can manage.

The ADR structure is standard for established foreign issuers. It preserves the primary listing in Korea while creating a dollar-denominated Nasdaq instrument that sits comfortably inside U.S. custody systems and pays dollar-denominated dividends after conversion. The pricing process will set the ADR-to-share ratio; that ratio then determines the dollar price per ADR and the implied valuation at which U.S. investors are buying in.

Now for the harder question. Twenty-eight billion dollars of new equity is a material supply event even in deep U.S. markets. Underwriters have roughly two weeks — from the June 24 board action to the July 10 target date — to run a roadshow and find buyers. AI allocations have grown through 2025 and into 2026, but long-only funds have tightened valuation discipline as interest rate expectations have stabilized. Whether the order book covers comfortably at the target size will be clear almost immediately.

For traders holding the Korea Exchange-listed shares, the ADR launch opens a new opportunity. Any persistent gap between the ADR price (adjusted for the conversion ratio and foreign exchange rates) and the Korea Exchange close creates a spread that can be traded — though withholding taxes on dividends and settlement timing mean the trade is not free. Options desks will price SK Hynix contracts in dollars for the first time, adding a new depth to the broader HBM volatility surface.

July 10 is four trading days away. The registration is live. The board has acted. What's left is execution.