SK Hynix lines up Goldman and Morgan Stanley for a $10 billion Solidigm IPO in the US

Ten billion dollars raised at a valuation of as much as $100 billion is a sale of about a tenth of Solidigm ^[15]. That holds only if both figures survive to pricing, and the reports say the details are still subject to revision ^[6]. A float that size would set a public price on the whole company. Measured against its parent's own deal, it would also be large. SK Hynix's $26.5 billion Nasdaq ADR listing in July was the largest US share sale ever by a foreign company ^[13], and the Solidigm raise would be about 38% of it ^[16].

The reports do not include Solidigm's revenue or earnings, so the multiple implied by $100 billion cannot be worked out from them. The case for the price is positioning. Solidigm has built its identity around high-density storage for AI data centers ^[9], with CoreWeave and Vast Data on its customer list ^[10], and its parent is the world's leading producer of high-bandwidth memory ^[13]. The valuation asks investors who paid up for SK Hynix's HBM business to pay something similar for the flash unit.

There are three plausible paths. If the pre-IPO round now being finalized ^[5] clears near the top figure, the IPO anchors on it. That round could instead price well below $100 billion, leaving "as much as" as the operative phrase in Bloomberg's report ^[17]. Or the listing could stall in Seoul, where it has already become a political question ^[12].

I expect the second. The $100 billion figure is a maximum, and nothing in the reporting ties it to Solidigm's earnings. The counter-case is demand. US investors absorbed $26.5 billion of SK Hynix stock in one sale ^[13], and the ADRs gave up only 4.3% when the insider lockup ended ^[14]. A private round at or near $100 billion would show I have this wrong.

Where the shares list is a deal term in its own right. Solidigm is headquartered in Rancho Cordova, California ^[9], so a US listing has its own logic. It also falls outside the rules Korean regulators adopted in August. Those rules bar most parent-subsidiary listings at home but, according to the Korea Times, do not automatically apply when the subsidiary lists abroad ^[11]. SK Hynix is not taking Solidigm to Seoul ^[1][2].