Morning brief 9:32 AM ET

Memory Report — 2026-07-10

SK Hynix's Nasdaq debut is the day's headline, and it doubles as a referendum on how global capital prices the memory shortage. The company is listing its American depositary receipts on the Nasdaq on Friday, raising $26.5 billion in what ranks as the largest U.S. share sale ever completed by a foreign company, surpassing the $25 billion Alibaba raised in its 2014 U.S. market entry. The offering was priced at $149 apiece Thursday, comprised 177.9 million ADRs with every ten ADRs corresponding to a single common share, and will trade Friday under the provisional ticker SKHYV before the permanent SKHY takes effect Monday; orders reportedly covered seven times the shares on offer. This is not just an access event. The company said it plans to use the proceeds to expand manufacturing facilities in South Korea and purchase equipment, including extreme ultraviolet lithography scanners, meaning fresh capital is being routed straight into the supply that remains the binding constraint. Among the three companies that produce HBM chips, SK Hynix leads with a 56.4% share based on its SEC filing, and all three are Nvidia suppliers, so the listing opens a direct route for American investors into the AI memory buildout.

The pricing backdrop stays firmly in the bulls' favor even as the rate of increase cools. TrendForce's latest survey has the DRAM market remaining extremely tight in the third quarter of 2026, with weaker consumer demand and a higher comparison base moderating contract price increases to 13 to 18% quarter over quarter. On NAND, with contract prices already at record highs and consumer demand slowing, price tolerance among consumer customers has reached its limit, so NAND flash contract prices are projected to rise 10 to 15% QoQ, a noticeably slower pace than prior quarters. The mechanism underneath is unchanged: the top three suppliers keep prioritizing production and shipments toward higher-priced, higher-margin server applications. Notably, Samsung's DRAM ASP rose more than 90% QoQ in the first quarter, with second-quarter growth estimated at 50 to 60%, and the company is now targeting another increase of around 20% in the third quarter.

Demand-side confirmation arrived from Menlo Park. Reuters, citing an internal memo, reported that Meta has signed long-term supply agreements with SanDisk, Samsung Electronics, and Sumitomo Electric for flash memory, memory chips, and fiber-optic equipment to support its AI computing buildout. Meta intends to complete deployment of 7 GW of computing capacity by 2026 and scale that to 14 GW by 2027, against as much as $145 billion in AI infrastructure spend this year, a level that surpasses the $136.6 billion in operating cash flow the company is projected to generate in 2026. The read-through lifted the complex: Micron rose 8%, Western Digital and Seagate each rose roughly 7%, and SanDisk gained nearly 7%, extending a rebound off an early-week selloff.

Micron remains the cleanest proof of the thesis. In fiscal Q3 2026, total revenue rose 345% to $41.4 billion on strong cloud and data center growth as NAND and DRAM prices more than doubled year over year, and non-GAAP net income jumped more than 1,200% to $25.11 per diluted share. The multi-year lock-in story is hardening across the industry, from CSPs to autos: Reuters recently reported that Micron signed a long-term memory supply agreement with General Motors, highlighting how customers are increasingly locking in supply amid tight conditions.

Watch SKHYV's first session closely: strong volume and a premium to the Seoul-listed shares would validate the re-rating case ahead of SK Hynix's Q2 earnings on July 29, and set the tone for whether U.S. capital keeps funding the shortage.

July 10th, 2026

Memory Report — 2026-07-10

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