Nasdaq president says SK Hynix listing is sparking a wave of global IPO interest

SK Hynix just pulled off the largest first-time US share sale by a foreign company, and Nasdaq’s president says the phone hasn’t stopped ringing since.

Nelson Griggs, president of Nasdaq, revealed that SK Hynix’s mammoth American depositary receipt listing has triggered a surge of interest from other international companies considering US IPOs or depositary receipts. The South Korean memory chip maker priced its ADRs at roughly $149, raising approximately $26.5 billion in proceeds from 17.79 million shares. That figure eclipses Alibaba’s 2014 IPO, which previously held the crown for largest foreign debut on a US exchange.

The offering was more than seven times oversubscribed, which in financial terms means investors wanted to buy seven dollars’ worth of shares for every one dollar available.

Nasdaq’s record-breaking first half

SK Hynix’s blockbuster listing caps off what Griggs described as the strongest first half in Nasdaq’s history, with $129.3 billion raised across the exchange in the first six months of 2026. Nasdaq hosted seven of the year’s ten largest IPOs during that stretch.

SK Hynix, the world’s second-largest memory chip producer behind Samsung, is a leading supplier of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, the specialized chips that power the GPU clusters running large language models and other AI workloads. ADR trading commenced around July 10, 2026, and the stock had already shown positive momentum in Asian markets ahead of its US debut.

The crypto capital question

A report from CoinDesk flagged that significant traditional IPOs of this magnitude could divert investment flows away from cryptocurrency assets. The $129.3 billion raised on Nasdaq in just six months represents an enormous pool of capital that might otherwise have been spread across alternative assets, including digital tokens and blockchain projects.

What this means for investors

Griggs’s comments about other international companies now eyeing US listings suggest this is the beginning of a trend, not a one-off event. The AI semiconductor sector is absorbing institutional capital at a pace that few other asset classes can match right now, with SK Hynix’s IPO generating seven times its allocation in demand.

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