On Thursday, four of the biggest investment banks on Wall Street will price a stock listing that could end up being the second-largest in history.
But there's a good chance you've never heard of the company.
It's SK Hynix, a South Korean memory chip maker, listing on the Nasdaq this week under the ticker SKHY.
If the deal prices in line with Wednesday's closing price in Seoul, the raise comes to $25.7 billion.
That would put it behind only SpaceX's recent IPO, and ahead of both the Saudi Aramco listing in 2019 and Alibaba's debut back in 2014.
The demand for the deal is the part worth sitting with.
It closed 7x oversubscribed. And that's after SK Hynix already scaled the deal back.
(For comparison, SpaceX was 2x oversubscribed)
And Hynix’s debut is a useful gauge it if you're trying to figure out where we actually are in the AI boom.
The company makes the high bandwidth memory chips that go inside Nvidia's AI processors. It’s one of the 3 major players in this space, with Samsung and Micron being the other 2.
None of them have an order book that can keep pace with demand, which is why all 3 companies keeps raising prices on its DRAM and NAND chips just to ration what it has.
Hynix shares in Korea are up 235% this year, and 635% over the past 12 months.
And despite that run, the stock still trades at just 5.5 times next year's expected earnings.
For a company growing this fast, it’s still relatively cheap
Now put that next to the other big listings getting all the attention.
SpaceX went public a few weeks ago at $135 a share in one of the most hyped IPOs in years. It rocketed to $225 within days. Then it gave back roughly a third of that gain.
OpenAI and Anthropic haven't listed at all yet. Both are still working through confidential filings, chasing valuations north of $1 trillion, and neither is close to any level of profitability.
None of that makes those three bad companies. It just means their share prices are being set almost entirely on a story about the future. What you're buying is a narrative, priced years ahead of the numbers.
SK Hynix is priced on something else entirely.
Real orders it can't fill fast enough… real earnings, today… and a valuation that, if anything, hasn't caught up yet.
Which is why in the coming weeks, SK Hynix is the stock worth watching.
Because oversubscribed demand for a cheap, profitable chip supplier tells you more about the real health of this AI cycle than another trillion-dollar story stock ever will.
Oliver