SK Group chairman: If the stock price remains stable, consider issuing additional shares of US stock, expanding investment in the US, and rolling out a new “memory-as-a-service” model.

SK hynix completed this week the largest-scale US initial public offering by a foreign company, raising $26.5 billion, and has already surpassed Alibaba to become the third-largest IPO in history.

SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that if the returns perform well and the share price remains stable, SK hynix is considering issuing more American depositary receipts (ADRs). He also revealed that SK Group’s investment in the US will far exceed the currently disclosed $35 billion, and that it will be “much, much bigger.”

Chey Tae-won also proposed a new business model concept of “memory as a service,” which would allow customers to rent usage rights to memory chips rather than purchasing physical semiconductors directly, thereby breaking through the memory capacity bottleneck. If this model takes off, it could reshape the business logic of chip companies.

SK hynix’s ADR opened on the first day at about 14% higher than the offering price.

US investment plan exceeds $35 billion—far more than that

As the fundraising wrapped up, Chey Tae-won further disclosed SK Group’s even more ambitious US investment plans.

He said that SK Group has already invested more than $35 billion in the US, covering the battery business and a new semiconductor plant in Indiana, but that this is only the starting point. “My plan’s scale will be much bigger, far beyond $35 billion,” he said.

This large-scale financing has been seen by observers as reflecting SK hynix’s dual strategic intentions. On the one hand, it replenishes capital to support capacity expansion; on the other hand, it enhances the company’s visibility and attractiveness among global investors. Chey Tae-won said that if returns keep improving and the share price stays steady, there remains a possibility for further expanding ADR issuance in the long term.

“Memory as a service”: a new business model comes to light

In this interview, Chey Tae-won proposed a new business model concept—“memory as a service” (Memory as a Service). He said SK hynix may shift into becoming a “memory services provider,” and that in the future customers may be able to rent memory resources by paying usage fees instead of purchasing physical chips.

Chey Tae-won did not spell out the specific implementation path for the model, but pointed out that new software support is needed. This concept has logical overlap with the already-validated “software as a service” (SaaS) and paid cloud computing models in the technology industry.

He said the core goal of rolling out such services is to address the bottleneck in memory capacity: “We must solve it.”

AI boom boosts demand, memory shortages spread to the consumer end

Chey Tae-won said plainly in the interview: “This is the age of AI. The AI era has greatly increased the demand for memory.” Concentrated procurement of memory chips by hyperscale data center operators has already driven chip prices significantly higher for smartphones, consumer electronics, and electric vehicles.

Last month, Apple’s memory costs surged, leading it to raise prices across its entire lineup of Mac, iPad, home devices, and the Vision Pro headset products.

To keep up with the pace of demand growth, the three leading memory-chip companies are accelerating capacity investments. Last week, SK hynix and Samsung jointly announced that they will invest a combined 8 million trillion Korean won (about $5310 billion) to build new chip factories, as part of South Korea’s broader plan to double memory production capacity within five years.

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