8 trillion, the second largest IPO in history is coming

Another historic moment unfolds.

Last night (Beijing time, July 10), SK Hynix, the global leader in memory semiconductors, officially listed on the Nasdaq. Its intraday gain once exceeded 18%, and its final closing market value reached a staggering $1.22 trillion (approximately 8.3 trillion yuan).

Notably, SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion through this offering, not only setting the record for the largest IPO by an overseas company in the U.S. market, but also ranking as the second-largest IPO in global history, second only to SpaceX which completed its listing last month.

Behind this globally sensational listing event lies a remarkable underdog journey spanning over 40 years. Originating from the Hyundai Group in 1983, Hyundai Electronics, the predecessor of SK Hynix, once teetered on the brink of bankruptcy until the SK Group took over. When it developed the first generation of HBM in 2013, few could have imagined that the company would become the global memory semiconductor hegemon.

This year, memory semiconductor companies have undoubtedly reaped enormous profits. Next up, Changxin Technology, a familiar name in the industry, is poised to take center stage.

Once on the Verge of Bankruptcy, Now Ranked as the World's Second-Largest IPO

SK Hynix's underdog success story is truly astonishing.

Back in 1983, South Korea's Hyundai Group officially founded Hyundai Electronics Co., Ltd. to enter the semiconductor industry. After two years of development, it successfully mass-produced 256K DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory), and listed on the Korea Exchange in 1996. Subsequently, in 1999, Hyundai Electronics completed the acquisition of LG Semiconductor, which rapidly expanded its scale. Its DRAM market share once surpassed Samsung, but the debt issues left by LG Semiconductor became a hidden risk.

Soon, the hidden risk erupted. Entering the 21st century, the global memory semiconductor industry fell into a deep downward cycle, with DRAM prices plummeting continuously. Burdened by huge debts, Hyundai Electronics faced a capital chain rupture and once stood on the edge of bankruptcy. In desperation, Hyundai Electronics was forced to spin off its memory business in 2001, establishing Hynix Semiconductor as an independent entity under the trusteeship of a consortium of creditor banks led by South Korea's state-owned banks.

Over the following decade, Hynix Semiconductor endured a long downturn, with repeated rumors of bankruptcy liquidation, and no one dared to take on this "hot potato". It was not until 2011 that South Korea's SK Group decided to acquire Hynix Semiconductor, a move that was highly controversial at the time, with rating agency Standard & Poor's even assigning a negative outlook.

In 2012, Hynix Semiconductor was officially renamed SK Hynix, embarking on its path of rebirth.

SK Hynix focused its efforts on HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), a chip capable of high-speed data transmission. However, the industry generally believed at that time that the HBM market had limited space and the return on R&D investment would take a long time. The reason SK Hynix chose to take a different path actually stemmed from its judgment back in 2009 that through-silicon via (TSV) technology and wafer-level packaging technology could overcome the performance limitations of memory chips, prompting the company to launch in-depth research and development.

It was based on these technologies that SK Hynix, in collaboration with AMD, launched the first generation of commercial HBM products in 2013, becoming an industry pioneer. Unfortunately, as the high-performance computing market was not yet mature enough to widely adopt HBM, the market response did not explode as expected.

But SK Hynix did not stop, instead deciding to increase its investment. In this process, SK Hynix applied the mass reflow molded underfill technology to HBM2E, thus reshaping the market landscape. Later, it developed the MR-MUF technology for HBM3 and HBM3E, which integrates thin chip stacking, heat dissipation, and production efficiency.

The turning point came in 2022. With the debut of ChatGPT, the AI wave began to sweep across the globe, and NVIDIA became the biggest winner with its advanced GPU chips. SK Hynix, through HBM3, became a major supplier of NVIDIA's H100 chips, completely reversing its fortunes.

To date, SK Hynix ranks first in the global HBM market with a 58% market share.

In this U.S. stock IPO, SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion through the issuance of American Depositary Shares (ADRs), surpassing Saudi Aramco's $25.6 billion U.S. IPO financing record in 2019, directly rising to second place in global history and becoming the largest initial public offering by a foreign company in the United States. Thus, an epic IPO was officially born.

Reaping Huge Profits, Distributing Bonuses to All Employees

Why is SK Hynix so popular?

The answer lies in the historic cycle of the memory semiconductor industry. In April this year, SK Hynix released its financial report for the first quarter of fiscal 2026, recording operating revenue of 52.5763 trillion won, operating profit of 37.6103 trillion won, and net profit of 40.3459 trillion won. Its first-quarter operating margin reached 72%, and net margin was 77%.

This means SK Hynix is more profitable than NVIDIA, which posted a gross margin of 74.9% and an operating margin of 65.6% in the same period.

Commenting on its performance, SK Hynix stated: "Although the first quarter is usually a seasonal off-season, market demand remained strong driven by expanded investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. The company continued its upward performance trajectory by expanding sales of high-value-added products such as High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), high-capacity server DRAM modules, and enterprise solid-state drives (eSSD)."

Driven by this, SK Hynix's share price surged. Data shows that SK Hynix's South Korean stock price has risen by over 634% year-to-date. In May this year, SK Hynix's market value broke through the $1 trillion mark for the first time, becoming the second South Korean company to achieve this milestone after Samsung Electronics.

Although SK Hynix's share price has recently corrected, we can see that three giants with a combined market value exceeding $10 trillion—NVIDIA, Google, and Amazon—not only placed orders in queues but also voluntarily proposed to take stakes in SK Hynix's new production lines and fund the procurement of expensive manufacturing equipment.

This scene is truly rare.

It is not just SK Hynix that has reaped huge profits, but also tens of thousands of its employees. Last September, SK Hynix abolished its original bonus cap of "no more than 1000% of basic salary" and implemented a new labor-management agreement: 10% of the annual operating profit is fixed, without any upper limit, injected into the bonus pool, covering all non-outsourced employees of the company, adopting a "blanket distribution" system.

Earlier this year, SK Hynix announced its performance bonuses for fiscal 2025, with 33,000 employees receiving an average bonus of 140 million won, equivalent to over 600,000 yuan. According to estimates by international consulting firms such as Macquarie, based on current performance expectations, SK Hynix's per capita bonus income in 2026 is expected to reach 670 million won, equivalent to 3.12 million yuan.

For a time, SK Hynix's employees became the "top trendsetters" in South Korea's workplace. There is even a dating joke circulating: nowadays, when SK Hynix employees go on blind dates, they pretend to work at Samsung Electronics; only when they meet a person of good character will they confess that they actually work at SK Hynix.

This scene is the most vivid manifestation of this unprecedented wealth creation boom.

Changxin Technology Prepares to Ring the Bell, China's Memory Semiconductor Industry Launches a Breakthrough Campaign

At present, an unprecedented "super memory semiconductor cycle" is emerging.

According to JPMorgan Chase's forecast, the global memory semiconductor market will reach a total size of $1.7 trillion by 2028. Among them, DRAM market revenue is expected to jump from $143 billion last year to $636 billion in 2026, and then reach $1.237 trillion in 2028; NAND market revenue is projected to increase from $71 billion to $454.5 billion in the same period.

The underlying logic is self-evident—this is not a simple cyclical rebound, but a structural demand transformation driven by AI computing power. As the scale of AI training and inference continues to expand, the memory capacity per AI server will increase to more than 10 times that of traditional data center servers.

Against the backdrop of an extreme imbalance between supply and demand, news of memory shortages, queued orders, and price hikes has hardly ceased over the past year. A recent report released by UBS also emphasizes that as AI demand continues to grow and long-term supply agreement (LTA) negotiations are still underway, the memory chip market cycle is further strengthening, and the structural supply shortage will continue at least until mid-2028.

For domestic memory semiconductor manufacturers, this is a historic opportunity not to be missed.

Turning our attention back from the U.S. market to China, a highly anticipated IPO is about to step onto the listing stage—according to the official website of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Changxin Technology will officially launch new share subscriptions on July 16. Some institutions boldly estimate that Changxin Technology's market value could reach 3 trillion yuan.

Headquartered in Hefei, Changxin Technology was founded by Zhu Yiming, the founder of GigaDevice. It is China's largest integrated DRAM R&D, design, and manufacturing enterprise. In the first quarter of this year, Changxin Technology's global DRAM market share stood at approximately 7.7% to 8%, ranking first in mainland China and fourth globally. U.S.-based semiconductor analysis firm SemiAnalysis also predicts that Changxin Technology is expected to surpass Micron by the end of 2026, becoming the world's third-largest DRAM supplier.

Coincidentally, Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd. (YMTC) based in Wuhan has also announced the launch of IPO counseling filing. Public information shows that YMTC's parent company, Unisoc Memory Group, completed its shareholding reform in September 2025 with an estimated valuation of 160 billion yuan. The market generally expects that after YMTC's listing, its market value is expected to reach 500 billion to 800 billion yuan, and even exceed 1 trillion yuan.

The breakthrough of the "two giants of domestic memory semiconductors" is a microcosm of the collective catch-up of domestic memory semiconductor enterprises. For example, Longsys, DapuSemi, Biway Storage, Demingli, and Shannon Semicon, known as the "Five Tigers of Shenzhen's Memory Industry", have a combined market value reaching the trillion-yuan level in this market boom.

But catching up is never achieved overnight, and we still need to face up to the gap with overseas giants. As Changxin Technology frankly stated in its prospectus, "There is still a certain gap between the company's process technology level and that of Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology. The product structure is in a state of continuous optimization, and the company's gross margin level is still lower than that of the top three international manufacturers."

The road ahead is long and challenging, but progress will lead us to the destination. This is destined to be a difficult journey, but it is certain that the summit moment for these Chinese memory semiconductor climbers will eventually arrive.

This article comes from the WeChat Official Account "Pedaily" (ID: pedaily2012), written by Liu Bo, and authorized for release by 36Kr.