The biggest-ever U.S. debut by a foreign company opened 14% above its price, but the proceeds head to South Korean fabs just as Commerce Secretary Lutnick presses for American factories.

SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion (KRW 40 trillion) in its U.S. stock-market debut, the largest ever by a company based outside the United States. The South Korean memory maker sold 177.9 million American depositary shares at $149 apiece, a raise that clears the $25 billion Alibaba brought in when it listed in New York in 2014.

The ADR structure was built for reach: it lets U.S. investors take a stake for roughly a tenth of what a full share costs on the Seoul exchange. TechCrunch AI, citing Bloomberg, reports the offering drew orders for more than seven times the shares available, and the stock opened 14% above its IPO price.

That appetite tracks SK Hynix's place in the AI supply chain. The company makes memory chips, including high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, a component that sits at the heart of the GPUs used to train and run AI systems. Nvidia counts SK Hynix among its primary suppliers.

The money, according to the company's filing, is bound for home. SK Hynix says it will put the proceeds toward a new fabrication plant in South Korea, a new chip-packaging facility, and EUV scanners — the lithography machines used to manufacture the next generation of chips.

Washington would prefer some of that spending land stateside. On Thursday, July 9, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick appeared at a Micron event where, TechCrunch AI reports citing Bloomberg, he said he is already in talks with SK Hynix and Samsung about building new factories in the U.S. The stated rationale is to keep South Korea from continuing to dominate memory-chip manufacturing. Micron, for its part, announced plans to invest $250 billion in new U.S. production.

The two pulls point in opposite directions. SK Hynix and Samsung have together pledged more than $550 billion for new manufacturing inside South Korea — the very concentration Washington is now lobbying to break.

Cover image: “Semiconductor Wafer of Microelectronics” by DrHughManning, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped.