$26.5 billion IPO and nine-figure underwriting fees—SK Hynix is making Wall Street rich.

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South Korean chip giant SK Hynix has landed on Nasdaq, bringing Wall Street a rare underwriting feast.

This world-leading high-bandwidth memory chip manufacturer officially began trading on Nasdaq this Friday, with a fundraising scale of up to $26.5 billion, making it one of the largest public offerings in history. According to the Financial Times on Friday, the total fees earned by the banks underwriting this stock issuance could reach nine figures, making it one of the most lucrative paydays Wall Street has ever made from an Asian company's IPO.

Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan are the lead underwriters for this secondary listing. According to two sources, the fee structure consists of a 0.5% fixed underwriting fee plus a discretionary incentive fee. Based on the $26.5 billion raised, the fixed fee alone exceeds $130 million.

This listing has not only reaped significant rewards for Wall Street bankers, but also reflects the AI-driven surge in demand for memory chips, which has firmly fixed the capital market’s attention on this sector.

One of the largest listings in history, on par with Alibaba

SK Hynix’s Nasdaq listing raised $26.5 billion, an extremely rare figure in global IPO history. The Financial Times compared it to Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO in 2014—the latter generated about $300 million in fees for Wall Street, and remains one of the most lucrative deals from an Asian company listing.

SK Hynix’s fee structure combines both fixed and incentive fees, and the total is also expected to reach nine figures, making this deal one of the most lucrative underwriting projects for Wall Street in recent years.

SK Hynix is a global leader in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, which are indispensable components for today’s AI computing infrastructure. The almost unlimited demand for advanced memory chips driven by AI has pushed the valuations of SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron—the world’s top three players—over $1 trillion this year.

SK Hynix’s share price on Korea’s Kospi index has surged more than 600% in the past year, indicating the market’s excitement. A hedge fund manager commented directly: "Everyone owns it. If the cycle ends, we’re done. But if supply and demand remains as is, we’ll earn back the entire market cap in the next two years."

Institutional investors rush for allocations, single expressions of interest reach $7 billion

The listing has attracted a large number of institutional investors. Situational Awareness, Baillie Gifford, and Coatue stated that together, they might subscribe to as much as $7 billion in American Depositary Shares (ADS) of SK Hynix planned for Nasdaq.

A hedge fund executive said: "In the past three or four years, we’ve seen wave after wave of mini-surges in AI, with different companies showing this level of revenue and demand at different stages." This trend also matches the recent strategy by hedge funds of buying high-growth tech stocks in large volumes.

For the investors participating this time, the case of Japanese memory chip maker Kioxia provides a valuable precedent. In 2020, Bain Capital gave up its plans to take Kioxia public when the memory chip market was in a severe supply glut.

However, times have changed. Kioxia has now become Japan’s highest-valued company, and Bain Capital’s investment is expected to generate nearly 20 times the return, likely to become one of the most lucrative exits in private equity history. This outcome has led the market to re-examine the long-term value of the memory chip sector and, to a certain extent, strengthened investor confidence in SK Hynix’s listing.

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