SK hynix's U.S. IPO raises $26.5 billion, setting a record.

$26.5 billion, 7x oversubscription, $200 billion in subscription intent — I think the most worth discussing here is not the IPO's success, but what this number reveals: global institutional capital's hunger for HBM is more real than any analyst report suggests.

$200 billion in subscriptions but only $26.5 billion in allocation means the vast majority of money that wanted in didn't get in. Where will those unallocated funds go? The secondary market.

On July 13, SKHY started trading. That day's price action wasn't entirely fundamental pricing — it was the $170 billion that got squeezed out chasing shares.

Note the premium in pricing: the offering price was at a 3% premium over the closing price on the Korean domestic market. This is no coincidence. SK hynix's clear goal in listing in the U.S. is to narrow the valuation gap with Micron. Both make DRAM, but Micron's valuation multiple in the U.S. market has historically been higher than Korean stocks.

This 3% premium is the first answer from the market: U.S. investors are willing to give AI memory suppliers higher pricing. The discount in the Korean market is structural, not fundamental.

Arm's single-day surge of 9.2% is even more interesting. Arm doesn't make memory and has no direct relationship with HBM, but the market treats it as a sentiment anchor for the AI chip ecosystem. SK hynix's ADR frenzy was directly interpreted as "the money for AI infrastructure hasn't been fully spent yet." The beneficiaries aren't just memory — it's the entire chip design chain.

The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose in tandem. This linkage shows that the chip sector is currently being priced by institutions as a whole, not on a company-by-company fundamental basis.

Baillie Gifford and Coatue appearing together on the cornerstone investor list is worth noting. Baillie Gifford is a long-term value-oriented investor, Coatue is a tech growth fund. Two very different investment styles simultaneously backing the same deal means this trade is understood as both a long-term value play and a short-term growth theme. This kind of consensus is actually rare at the institutional level, showing that the HBM narrative has strong inclusiveness.

Finally, this is the third-largest listing in global securities history. Who are the top two? Saudi Aramco and Alibaba. One is the world's largest energy asset, the other China's biggest internet platform. SK hynix ranks third, representing the most core hardware infrastructure of the AI era. This ranking itself is a concretization of a macro narrative: where the world's biggest money is chasing.

DYOR Not financial advice.