SKHX Keeps Sliding as a Record Capex Plan Lands and the Nasdaq Dilution Looms

Selling the $1.3 Trillion Blueprint

SK hynix's latest leg down isn't a demand scare — it's a reaction to its own government's ambition. On Monday, President Lee Jae Myung's administration moved to unveil a roughly $1.3 trillion (₩2,000 trillion) chip-investment plan spread across Samsung and SK hynix over the next decade, the centerpiece of Lee's "Three Mega Projects for the Great Leap Forward." The blueprint reportedly has the two companies each building four to five new fabs around Gwangju, with SK hynix expanding NAND capacity in North Chungcheong. On paper it's a multi-year AI-capacity land grab. To traders, the immediate read is simpler: that much capex is a near-term drain on cash and margins, and the stock that ran the hardest into the announcement is the one with the most to give back. Samsung fell about 4.7% and SK hynix about 3.1% in the Seoul cash session as the news circulated; the SKHX perp, which converts the KRW share price to USD through its oracle, extended that to a 7.76% slide over eight hours to $1,662.

The Dilution Sitting on Top of It

The capex headline doesn't land in a vacuum. SK hynix is also weeks away from the largest ADR offering on record — a roughly $29 billion Nasdaq listing of 17.79 million new shares worth about ₩45.45 trillion, with trading tentatively set for July 10 and BofA, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan running the book. That deal was drawn up against record highs and a 280%-plus year-to-date run that pushed the market cap past $1 trillion. Now it has to price into a market moving the other way. New shares on top of a decade of committed fab spending is a lot of fresh supply and a lot of capital outflow to absorb at once, and that's the overhang doing the work here — not a change in the HBM demand story, where SK hynix still holds the lion's share of Nvidia's HBM4 allocation.

How the Tape Got Here

This didn't start Monday. The memory complex cracked on June 23, when a global tech rout hit Samsung and SK hynix hardest, knocking SK hynix down roughly 12% intraday on fears around Nvidia's Rubin ramp and softening AI-memory demand, and dragging the KOSPI down more than 4% in a single session. Friday brought another leg lower of more than 8%. Because Samsung and SK hynix together now make up over half the KOSPI, there's nowhere to hide — the index and the stock move as one, and leveraged single-stock products only amplify the swings. For SKHX specifically, the oracle's KRW-to-USD conversion means any wobble in the won layers on top of the equity move, so the perp can travel further than the underlying on a bad day. Eight hours of that left it at $1,662.