SK Hynix Pops 14% in Wall Street Debut

Plus: Fed taps Marc Andreessen and Asha Sharma, Yann LeCun to start new fund, China successfully launches reusable rocket

Brandon Gorrell

Jul 10, 2026

Happy Friday.

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The current thing in tech and business is the SK Hynix IPO.

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SK Hynix Pops 14% in Wall Street Debut

South Korean memory-chip giant SK Hynix made its Nasdaq debut today, raising $26.5 billion in the largest-ever first-time U.S. share sale by a foreign company. Demand reportedly exceeded the available shares more than sevenfold, and the company’s American depositary receipts opened at $170 — 14% above their $149 offering price — giving SK Hynix a market capitalization of roughly $1.03 trillion.

The blockbuster listing caps an extraordinary run for memory manufacturers, fueled by surging demand from AI systems, particularly for the high-bandwidth memory used alongside advanced AI accelerators. SK Hynix, Samsung, and U.S.-based Micron dominate the global memory market, and SK Hynix’s Korean-listed shares are up over 600% the past year as investors have rushed to gain exposure to one of the AI boom’s most critical bottlenecks.

Clip Spotlight: Eric Seufert's bull case for why AI will lead to a prosperous society

"My sense is that a lot of AI investments are going to push the economic constraints away from production and toward distribution. They're going to make distribution the binding constraint. Because you have a flourishing of content creation [with AI]."

"When that becomes the actual problem with distribution, and these AI investments go into things like ads platforms, digital advertising, and recommendation systems, then commerce and the economy become much more efficient."

"Then, as a result, you get a lot more heterogeneous product development, because you can actually reach people economically."

"Like, what is the constraint right now? It's, 'Can I reach a big enough audience to support a business? I've only got this blunt tool.'"

(Eric's talking about the paradigm of needing to build a huge audience as a precursor to being able to survive economically as a consumer business here.)

"But if these AI investments go into making these recommendation systems and digital ad systems better — reaching these pockets of people that have these very specific interests that were totally unserved before — then you enable a lot more commerce. And you support this flourishing of people making this wide, diverse variety of goods. And you get rid of this idea of, like, the Pareto principle where you have to serve the 20% that supply 80% of the commerce."

"No, now you can serve *everybody*. And they can pay what they're willing to pay for these things. You create this flourishing of everyone getting exactly what they want."

"We don't have a homogenized society anymore. We don't have people who need homogenized goods anymore. And we have a lot more particular, specific media right now."

"And we can reach people and advertise to them the things that they have demand for, for products that weren't economically viable prior to these distribution systems."

"That is the prosperous society. Being able to reach people to meet the demands that they have with the products that they couldn't access before with ads they wouldn't otherwise see absent these systems."

"You can make a very credible AI bull case that that's what AI delivers to us."