US shares of SK Hynix SKHYV jumped after the stock’s IPO on Friday, as the South Korean memory semiconductor producer raised $26.5 billion, despite its home-listed stock having fallen 25% over the past three weeks. SK Hynix priced its American depositary shares at $149. The newly minted stock ended the day Friday trading at $168 per share, a roughly 12.8% increase from the IPO price.

The IPO was seen as a critical test of investor interest for a red-hot corner of the stock market in 2026. Even with the recent slide in the company’s South Korea-listed shares 000660, the stock is up 234% this year and 634% over the last 12 months.

SK Hynix was “priced at a 3% premium to the as-converted price of the ordinary shares in Korea at yesterday’s close. With the ADSes up about 16% [midday] today, I’d say the IPO has been a success. They raised a lot of capital to fund their capex needs while delivering a satisfying return to investors in the US offering without hurting their stock price in Korea,” says Nick Einhorn, director of research at Renaissance Capital. A cross listing like SK Hynix (which has shares already trading in another market) tends to be “relatively flat, especially if the original listing is highly liquid, so I’d say a 16% return is strong.”

SK Hynix and Samsung 005930 have been prime beneficiaries of the intense demand for AI-related hardware. But in recent weeks, some caution appears to have crept into investor views of these stocks. Along with the slide in SK Hynix’s Korea-listed shares, Samsung, Micron Technologies MU, SanDisk SNDK, and Western Digital WDC are each down double digits in recent weeks.

One concern is that the memory chip business is highly cyclical, prone to big swings in supply and demand. While profits at these companies have surged due to intense AI demand, analysts foresee significant supply coming online in 2027 and 2028. In fact, SK Hynix’s ADS sale is slated to fund two key production-related projects.

While memory companies like SK Hynix currently enjoy strong pricing power, which makes big price increases possible, Morningstar equity analyst Jing Jie Yu recently said those increases “only exist because of such deep undersupply.” As that supply comes online in 2027 and 2028, “supply/demand dynamics should improve tremendously, eroding the pricing power of memory players and leading to a cycle turn.”

With the company raising $26.5 billion in its US sale, its IPO clocks in as the second-largest on record, according to Renaissance Capital. Among shares representing non-US companies trading on US exchanges—either through ADS or American depositary receipts—SK Hynix eclipsed the 2014 offering from Alibaba BABA, which raised $21 billion.

Renaissance’s Einhorn believes the strong reception for SK Hynix is a positive signal for future IPOs tied to the AI boom. That includes data center company Csquare, which is expected to come to market next week. “It’s a sign that investors remain enthusiastic about the AI-related data center buildout,” he says.