Latest AI News
SK Hynix raises $26.5B in the biggest foreign IPO in US history, is urged to build new US fabs
The AI chip boom just produced its biggest Wall Street moment yet. SK Hynix, a South Korean memory chip giant,said Fridayit has raised $26.5 billion (KRW 40 trillion) in its U.S. market debut. SK Hynix sold 177.9 million American depositary shares (ADRs) at $149 each, structured so U.S. investors can buy in at roughly a tenth of what a full share costs in Seoul. This deal, the largest-ever U.S. debut by a non-American company, toppedAlibaba’s$25 billion IPO in 2014. The company begins trading on the Nasdaq today, Friday, July 10, under the temporary ticker SKHYV. Regular trading opens Monday, July 13, when the ticker officially becomes SKHY. So far, U.S. investors are lapping it up. Thestock opened at 14% over its IPO price, and the price was still rising in early trading on Friday. This even as it priced its U.S. shares at a 2.7% premium to its own three-day average back home in Seoul, according to itsKorea Stock Exchange filing. Yet, demand for the offering wasreportedlymore than seven times the available shares, per media reports. That’s especially amazing considering Korean companies have long traded at a discount to their global peers. That valuation gap is called the Korea Discount. Investors often cite factors such as complex corporate governance structures, low shareholder returns, regulatory uncertainty, and geopolitical risks related to North Korea to justify why companies from that country don’t command higher share prices. But SK Hynix clearly isn’t suffering from the Korea Discount and that’s because it makes memory chips, including high-bandwidth memory (HBM). HBM is a key component of AI GPUs processors. And right now, Nvidia relies on SK Hynix as one of its primary suppliers. Per its filing, the money raised from eager U.S. investors will go to three places: a new fab in South Korea (being built now to address the worldwide shortage of memory cause by AI); a new packaging facility in that country; and EUV scanners, the machines that make next-generation chips possible. Meanwhile, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stopped by a Micron event Thursday with a message for the broader chip industry, not just for U.S. memory maker Micron (who is one of SK Hynix’s biggest competitors). Lutnickreportedlysaid he’s already in talks with Samsung (the third major memory maker, worldwide) and SK Hynix about building new factories in the U.S. The idea being not to let South Korea continue to be the country that dominates this important tech. Micron, naturally, is in. Itannounced it plansto invest $250 billion in new U.S. manufacturing, a commitment the U.S. memory chip company says will create more than 90,000 jobs and keep leading-edge chip production on American soil. The timing of Lutnick’s request is notable beyond this U.S. IPO for SK Hynix: Both Korean chipmakersjust pledged more than $550 billionfor new manufacturing investment in South Korea.
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Open source AI matters more than ever, according to Hugging Face’s Clem Delangue
Open source AI is booming, according toHugging FaceCEOClem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, Rebecca Bellan talked to Delangue about why the open vs closed source fight matters in the wake of Anthropic’s halted Fable release, and why he’s worried about the possibility that a handful of big companies could end up controlling everything. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Decoding Google’s Formula for Gemma That Won it 400 Million Downloads
By combining native vision, audio, and reasoning in a compact model, Gemma provides a compelling platform for local AI agents.
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Why Broadcom-VMWare Is Going After India’s Private AI Opportunity
With production AI becoming a priority for regulated industries, Indian enterprises are rethinking where their AI workloads should run.
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Can Subsidies Alone Deliver Gujarat’s ₹6 Lakh Cr AI Data Centre Plan?
Gujarat enters a crowded field of states vying to attract data centre investments. Its success will ultimately depend on execution rather than announcements.
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Open-Source AI Platform Ollama Raises $65 Mn in Series B Funding
Ollama’s total funding now stands at $88 million.
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OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Work Powered by GPT-5.6 for Enterprise Workflows
The launch marks OpenAI's biggest push yet to turn ChatGPT into a workplace productivity platform with connected apps and AI agents.
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India's AI-Led E-commerce Market to Touch $250 Bn by 2030: Shiprocket-Deloitte Report
AI, vernacular commerce, and rising adoption in smaller cities are fuelling the rise of India's e-commerce market.
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OpenAI Kills Atlas
Instead of maintaining Atlas as a separate application, OpenAI is moving those browser capabilities into ChatGPT Work.
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MiniMax CEO Gives Up Salary Until AGI as Company Announces $2 Bn Funding
He also committed to transferring shares equivalent to 4% of the company’s total equity from his personal holdings over the next four years to reward long-term employees.
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TCS's $2.6 Billion AI Business Still Lacks an Annuity Engine
TCS's $2.6-billion AI business is growing rapidly, but most engagements last only one or two quarters, making revenue far less recurring than traditional IT outsourcing contracts.
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India Joins Australia, Canada to Advance AI Infra, Workforce Skilling
The MoU operationalises the ACITI partnership, with a focus on AI, hardware supply chains, critical minerals, and commercialising emerging technologies.
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