By Hamza Faisal
SK Hynix has scrapped plans to take its American subsidiary Solidigm public on the Nasdaq, killing what was shaping up to be the biggest semiconductor IPO in US history after a bruising backlash from its own shareholders and South Korea's financial regulators.
The world's second-largest memory chipmaker announced the reversal in a regulatory filing on Friday morning, saying it would halt both the IPO review and the pre-IPO fundraising round that had been running alongside it. Solidigm, the enterprise solid-state drive maker born from SK Hynix's 2021 acquisition of Intel's NAND flash business, had been eyed for a listing that could value it at up to $150 billion and raise as much as $15 billion.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley had already been appointed as lead underwriters for the offering, which was being targeted as early as 2027.
A "duplicate listing" fight
The core objection was one Seoul knows well: the "duplicate listing." Solidigm sits at the bottom of a five-layer ownership chain — SK Group, SK Square, SK Hynix, an AI company, then Solidigm — and investors feared a separate US float would dilute their stake in the chipmaker's fastest-growing asset while deepening the holding-company discount that has long depressed Korean equities.
On Monday, Financial Supervisory Service Governor Lee Chan-jin told the National Assembly that both his agency and the Financial Services Commission had concluded the plan would constitute a duplicate-listing violation. SK Hynix announced that it would halt its review "after comprehensively considering capital market conditions and other factors," effectively withdrawing the listing under pressure from shareholders and regulators alike.
The company insisted the economic case for an IPO — and its commitment to investing in Solidigm's growth — had not changed. "Our assessment of the economic benefits of an IPO and the need to support Solidigm's growth has not changed," a company official said, framing the decision purely as a matter of shareholder value and market timing.
Market timing did it no favors
The decision lands in the middle of a brutal semiconductor selloff. SK Hynix shares have fallen about 30 percent since late September, battered by doubts about returns on AI spending, competition in memory chips, and the Solidigm debate itself. Chip stocks suffered their steepest daily fall since June this week, as funding stress at AI infrastructure providers made investors more selective about capital-intensive hardware stories.
Solidigm still needs the capital to expand production of enterprise SSDs feeding AI data centers, and SK Hynix says it will explore other ways to enhance shareholder value. The chipmaker reports third-quarter earnings on October 28, which will offer the first detailed look at how the memory cycle is holding up.
The episode also serves as a litmus test for Seoul's campaign to end the "Korea discount" — the persistent valuation gap that has kept South Korean equities trading below global peers. Forcing one of the country's biggest chipmakers to abandon a marquee US listing sends a clear signal about where minority shareholders now rank.
By Hamza Faisal
