GoKawiilSK Hynix opened at $170 per share on the Nasdaq on Friday, rising about 14%, as U.S. investors jumped at the opportunity to get a stake in South Korea's second-most valuable company.
The stock is trading under the ticker symbol SKHYV, and will switch to SKHY as of Tuesday.
The company's American depositary receipts, or ADRs, were priced at $149, raising $26.5 billion for its aggressive expansion plans, which includes investing in new factories and equipment.
"It's a kind of dream, and now it's a dream come true," SK Hynix Chairman Chey Tae-won told CNBC's Kristina Partsinevelos on Friday.
SK Hynix trails only Samsung by market cap in its home country. Like its larger rival, the company makes computer memory, which is used by phones and PCs to store short-term data. SK Hynix's roster of customers includes some of the biggest names in technology, such as Nvidia and Apple .
Memory, for decades, was tucked in a sleepy corner of the semiconductor world, but the artificial intelligence boom has turned it into a massive growth market.
Tae-won told CNBC that when he meets with customers and partners, everybody expects more chips. He said that even when SK Hynix announced it would double capacity within five years, customers said they still need more.
"All my customers said that, 'Well, that's not enough, man, and, well, we need more,'" Tae-won said Friday.