1. SK Hynix raised $26.5B on the Nasdaq, the largest US listing by a foreign company ever.
The South Korean memory maker debuted on July 10, pricing at $149 and closing its first session around $168, up roughly 13%, after the book came in at seven times the shares on offer. The $26.5 billion raise surpasses Alibaba's $25 billion from 2014 as the largest US listing by a foreign company, with BofA Securities, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan as lead underwriters. The strategic logic sits in the AI supply chain: SK Hynix supplies roughly 56% of the world's high-bandwidth memory, the chip stacked inside every Nvidia H100, H200, and Blackwell GPU, and the proceeds fund new fab capacity aimed at a supply gap that still has not closed. The listing is also a valuation play. Korean-listed companies trade at a persistent discount to global peers, the "Korea discount," and management is betting that a US listing, US disclosure, and a US investor base close a chunk of that gap. Two weeks after the strategists we quoted were calling bubble territory, the order book said demand is very much alive.
Why you care: Every bulge-bracket ECM group either worked this deal or watched it price, and it is the cleanest live case study on why companies cross-list in the US: escaping a home-market valuation discount. That topic is now standard in ECM and technology coverage interviews, and this is the example your interviewer is thinking of.
Interview angle: "Seven times oversubscribed in a higher-for-longer rate environment tells you AI infrastructure investment has not peaked. If I am pitching semiconductor or data center M&A, that order book is my demand evidence: investors just underwrote the memory supply chain's growth story in size, at full price."