Shares of SK Hynix, the latest technology company to test investor appetite for A.I.-related companies, rose around 14 percent on Friday, as the chip manufacturer made its U.S. trading debut on the Nasdaq.
The South Korean company manufactures storage chips, which are a backbone of data center infrastructure, and is the latest trillion-dollar initial public offering this year.
SK Hynix began trading at $170 a share, above its initial public offering price of $149, though its stock price nudged slightly down in afternoon trading.
With a roughly $1.2 trillion market capitalization, SK Hynix becomes one of the largest foreign companies trading on an American exchange.
High-bandwidth memory chips are a crucial component in feeding data necessary for training A.I. systems, and the surge in data center spending has exhausted much of the world’s supply for these semiconductors. This has allowed SK Hynix and other memory makers to raise prices and maintain wide profit margins.
SK Hynix’s I.P.O. this week raised about $27 billion, making it one of the largest new share offerings on record, though smaller than SpaceX’s blockbuster $86 billion public offering last month.
The semiconductor maker joins a busy field of public offerings by companies tied to the artificial intelligence sector this year.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s offering was rolled out with enormous hype and fanfare on Wall Street. But after soaring in the first few days of trading, the company’s share price tumbled sharply. This week, SpaceX shares fell below the $150 price at which they started trading, though they are still above the I.P.O. price of $135.
It’s common for newly public stocks to jump on their first days of trading, only to fall a few weeks later, as pent-up demand settles. But investors remain jittery about any signs that enthusiasm for the A.I. boom has begun to wane.
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