Quick Read
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SK Hynix’s $28B NASDAQ IPO trades at just 7x forward earnings, which is cheaper than NVDA at 22x, even as profits doubled to $28B and Q1 revenue tripled.
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Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund may anchor $7B of the deal, betting HBM demand won’t follow historical memory cycle collapse patterns.
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John Coogan spent Wednesday’s TBPN segment arguing that the largest AI hardware IPO no US retail investor can buy yet might also be the cheapest name in the entire complex. SK Hynix, the South Korean memory giant, is preparing what could be a $28 billion NASDAQ listing, potentially ranking among the largest ever New York debuts by an Asian company. The stock is already public in Seoul, where shares have run up more than 750% over the past year.
US investors get a read-through only through the ecosystem, and the anchor there is NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), whose Blackwell and Rubin roadmaps depend on the exact high-bandwidth memory stacks SK Hynix ships in volume.
The $28 Billion IPO and the Eye-Popping Numbers
Coogan walked through the financials on air. “2025 revenue grew 47% to $63 billion. Profit more than doubled, $28 billion in profit. Q1 revenue tripled year over year.” Seoul market cap sits around $1.1 trillion, which puts SK Hynix in roughly the same weight class as Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) at $1.11 trillion, and materially smaller than NVIDIA’s $5.09 trillion.
The book has notable anchors. Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund, alongside Baillie Gifford, could take up to $7 billion in the deal. When a fund built on a single AI-scaling thesis writes a nine-figure ticket to a memory manufacturer, the signal is that the buyer thinks HBM demand is not going to normalize along the old textbook curve.
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Why the Stock Trades at Just 7x Forward Earnings
Memory is scar-tissue territory. Every cycle over the past two decades has ended the same way, with a supply glut and a 60% compression in gross margin. Investors are “pattern matching to previous cycles, not thinking about this as a different technology cycle.”
The comp math is what makes it interesting. Micron trades at a forward P/E of 6 after posting $41.46 billion in revenue and 84.6% GAAP gross margin in fiscal Q3 2026, per its quarterly press release. NVIDIA trades at a forward P/E of 22. SK Hynix’s rumored 7x sits closer to Micron than to NVIDIA, which suggests the market still refuses to underwrite memory earnings beyond the next 18 months.