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Greetings! Tech IPOs are definitely getting more interesting. On the heels of last week’s debuts by Bending Spoons and Lime, this week we’ve got South Korean memory chip giant SK Hynix, which is expected to list on the Nasdaq on Friday, adding to its existing South Korean stock exchange listing. Hynix will raise money as part of the Nasdaq listing, making investor reception to the offering another indicator of the IPO market’s strength. For U.S. investors, Hynix’s U.S. listing will make the stock easier to buy. That’s a big deal. As things stand now, only one of the three primary makers of memory chips—Micron Technology—is U.S. based (the third is another South Korean company, Samsung). To be sure, investors might have preferred Hynix to have listed here a couple of years ago, before the memory chip explosion happened. Hynix’s revenue, for instance, soared 200% between 2023 and 2025, and then rose another 200% in the first quarter of this year. It’s little wonder that Hynix shares are up nearly 800% in the past 12 months. The good news is that despite the rally, Hynix still looks relatively cheap. On a forward sales basis, for instance, it’s trading at 3.6 times, while Micron is at 4.6. (Nvidia, by comparison, is at 10.8.) Memory chip stocks are typically traded on a book value basis, however, because of the industry’s history of intense swings from oversupply to shortage—and from profits to losses. Measured on a price to book-value basis, Hynix is trading at a discount to Micron as well, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. (For more on Hynix’s valuation, see this piece from April by our columnist Anita Ramaswamy.) That suggests investors have an opportunity. But they need to have a strong stomach: Chip stocks are volatile. Last week, memory chip stocks sold off. Depending on whom you talk to, the reason was either worries about an oversupply emerging (which seems dubious) or concerns that Apple might succeed in getting government approval to buy memory chips from Chinese makers, which are blacklisted by the Pentagon. Whatever the case, Hynix’s listing will make investing in the AI-related sector more interesting. The other big Nasdaq-related event this week is SpaceX’s addition to the Nasdaq-100 index, set for Tuesday. That index tracks the 100 (duh) biggest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq based on market cap. A bunch of index funds mirror the Nasdaq 100 and will have to buy up SpaceX shares to keep up. As we’ve written, the Nasdaq changed its rules to allow SpaceX early entry into the index. Ahead of Tuesday’s addition, funds have presumably been buying the stock although it’s possible we’ll see a pop this week. SpaceX’s stock has been on a bit of a rollercoaster ride since it started trading June 12. The shares priced at $135 in the IPO, hit a closing high of $211.39 a couple of days later and closed on Thursday at $162. • Alibaba Group has banned employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code, and asked them to remove all Claude models from their work computers, according to two employees with knowledge of the matter. • Tesla said it rolled out its Robotaxi service in Miami on Friday, according to a post from its social media account on X. It’s the fifth city the automaker has launched its ride-hailing service in. Start your day with Applied AI, the newsletter from The Information that uncovers how leading businesses are leveraging AI to automate tasks across the board. Subscribe now for free to get it delivered straight to your inbox twice a week. |