Solidigm, a subsidiary of SK Hynix (SKHY), one of the world’s largest memory chip giants, is considering an independent initial public offering in the U.S. stock market as early as next year. Solidigm’s independent listing plan coincides with the trend of AI investment spreading from accelerators to complete data center systems. Its enterprise SSD business has captured the incremental storage demand brought by the expansion of intelligent agents, and cooperation with customers such as CoreWeave has improved demand visibility while also providing a practical customer basis for an independent valuation. In the era of AI inference, the value of storage is reflected simultaneously in capacity supply, computing utilization, and system operating costs. Solidigm’s strong growth opportunities come from the expansion of AI data scale, upgrades in enterprise storage configurations, and customers’ continuous pursuit of unit capacity cost and system efficiency.
People familiar with the matter said that this company, the world’s second-largest DRAM/NAND memory chip manufacturer, is in talks with potential advisers about a U.S. stock market listing for its NAND flash business subsidiary. Some people familiar with the matter said the listing could value Solidigm at as much as $100 billion, but discussions are still ongoing, and details such as the timing and valuation of the listing may change. A Solidigm spokesperson declined to comment.
Solidigm is an enterprise data storage company headquartered in the United States and owned by SK Hynix. Its core business is solid-state drives based on NAND flash and related storage technologies, with a focus on serving data centers, cloud computing, and edge AI. Its business foundation comes from Intel’s former NAND flash and SSD business. SK Hynix announced in 2020 that it would acquire the related business for total consideration of about $9 billion. It completed the first-stage closing in December 2021 and established Solidigm, and the remaining second-stage closing was completed on March 27, 2025. The company is headquartered in Rancho Cordova, California, has 13 business locations worldwide, and employs more than 2,000 people.
Solidigm’s main business must be clearly distinguished from SK Hynix’s HBM business. HBM is a type of high-bandwidth DRAM, mainly providing high-speed data access during runtime for accelerators such as GPUs. Solidigm’s core products, by contrast, belong to the NAND flash storage system and are used to store large-capacity data. The SK Hynix Group covers businesses including DRAM, HBM, NAND, and SSDs, and Solidigm represents an important enterprise flash storage platform within it.
In August of this year, Solidigm announced an agreement with CoreWeave (CRWV) to sell enterprise-grade solid-state drive storage capacity to this large AI cloud computing company. CoreWeave explicitly pointed out that storage has become a key constraint in AI platform capacity planning. Other customers include VAST Data, Dell Technologies (DELL), and Tencent Holdings (TCEHY). Market research firm TrendForce estimates that in 2026, server DRAM contract prices will rise by about 270% cumulatively, and enterprise SSD prices will rise by about 235% cumulatively. The combined proportion of DRAM and NAND in the capital expenditure of major cloud service providers will rise from 47% in 2026 to 68% in 2027. In terms of stock prices, as of the U.S. stock market close on September 25, 2026, Micron (MU) had risen by about 279.2% year to date, while SK Hynix’s Korea-listed shares had risen by about 186.0% cumulatively.
