Solidigm Prepares IPO Raising $15 Billion: Former Intel Memory Business Could Be Valued at $150 Billion
American Solidigm, owned by South Korean SK Hynix, is considering an initial public offering (IPO) as early as 2027. According to Reuters, the company could raise about $15 billion at a business valuation of up to $150 billion.
Preparation has already moved to a practical stage: this week Solidigm held meetings with investment banks competing for roles as organizers of the future offering.
If current targets hold, the listing could become the largest IPO in U.S. history for a semiconductor company. However, the deal is still at an early stage: timing, offering size, and final valuation may change depending on the market.
Solidigm Grew Out of Intel's Memory Business
Solidigm emerged from one of the largest deals in the memory market.
In 2020, SK Hynix agreed to acquire Intel's NAND memory and storage business for about $9 billion. NAND is a type of non-volatile flash memory that retains information after power is turned off and is used, among other things, in solid-state drives.
The first phase of the deal was completed at the end of 2021. Then SK Hynix received Intel's enterprise SSD (solid-state drives) business and a NAND memory plant in Dalian, China, and a separate American company, Solidigm, was created for the acquired assets.
Today its headquarters is in California, and its main specialization remains enterprise data storage systems for servers, cloud platforms, and data centers.
At the upper valuation of $150 billion, Solidigm's potential value would be more than 16 times higher than the price of the original SK Hynix-Intel deal. This is not a direct comparison of the same business's value—over the years the company has developed and received new investments—but it shows the scale of revaluation of data storage infrastructure.
AI Made Data Storage Part of the Infrastructure Race
Growing interest in Solidigm is not only due to the general rise in the semiconductor market.
The artificial intelligence boom has sharply increased demands on data center infrastructure. Operating large models requires not only graphics accelerators and high-speed operating memory but also huge volumes of persistent data storage.
Drives are used at various stages of AI system operation: for storing training datasets, preparing information, working with knowledge bases, inference—executing queries of an already trained model—and storing computation results.
Solidigm stakes on high-capacity, high-performance enterprise SSDs. The company's lineup includes drives with capacities up to 122TB, designed for data centers and large-scale workloads.
The faster data volumes grow, the more important become not only computing chips but also the ability to quickly store and move information between various infrastructure levels.
$150 Billion Would Put Solidigm Above the Sector's Largest Recent IPOs
Solidigm's potential valuation is especially notable in comparison with other large semiconductor companies' offerings.
Arm Holdings received a valuation of about $54 billion at its stock market debut in 2023.
Cerebras Systems, a manufacturer of computing systems for artificial intelligence, received a fully diluted valuation of about $56 billion at its IPO in 2026.
Solidigm at a valuation of $150 billion would be significantly above both benchmarks.
Reuters notes that the planned offering could become the largest IPO of a semiconductor company in the U.S. At the same time, about $15 billion that Solidigm could raise in the deal would also make the offering one of the largest tech debuts of recent years.
But $150 billion is not yet the approved price of the company. The actual valuation will depend on Solidigm's financial performance, demand from institutional investors, and the state of the technology market immediately before the listing.
Company Simultaneously Considers Expanding Production in the U.S.
Preparation for the IPO occurs amid a possible expansion of Solidigm's production base.
Reuters earlier reported that the company is exploring construction of a NAND memory plant in the U.S. One of the most likely regions named was upstate New York.
Currently, the main production infrastructure obtained from Intel is tied to the plant in Dalian, China.
An American fab could become Solidigm's first major production facility in the U.S. and bring memory production closer to American data center operators. However, a final decision to build such a plant has not yet been announced.
Separately, SK Hynix said in August that it is considering various options to enhance Solidigm's competitiveness after reports about possible financing of the company before the IPO of about 5 trillion won—around $3.6 billion.
The new scenario is much larger: it involves a full-fledged stock market offering raising about $15 billion.
This Is a Separate IPO of Solidigm, Not a Listing of SK Hynix Itself
Solidigm is owned by SK Hynix, but the potential deal concerns specifically the American subsidiary.
This fundamentally distinguishes the current story from plans by SK Hynix itself to expand the presence of its shares on the American market.
Solidigm's IPO should for the first time give investors a separate market valuation of the enterprise storage business, which is currently inside the larger SK Hynix group.
It is the ability to separate the fast-growing infrastructure asset into an independent public company that could be one of the reasons for interest in the offering.
The Key Figure Remains a Benchmark, Not the Deal Price
Despite the scale of the discussed sums, Solidigm has not officially announced an IPO.
The company declined to comment on the possible offering to Reuters. SK Hynix stated that it is considering various options to enhance Solidigm's competitiveness, but a specific plan has not yet been confirmed.
Meetings with investment banks show that preparation has become more substantive, but significant time may pass before organizers are determined, documents are filed, and the price range is approved.
Therefore, $150 billion and $15 billion should currently be perceived as parameters discussed by sources at an early stage, not as the final valuation and guaranteed amount raised.
Nevertheless, the very possibility of such an offering shows how strongly the artificial intelligence boom has changed the value of companies outside the most visible graphics processor market. Investors are increasingly valuing not only computing but also the entire infrastructure around it—memory, data storage, networking, data centers, and power supply.
Solidigm finds itself precisely in this segment: Intel's former NAND memory and enterprise storage business is now viewed as a standalone infrastructure asset potentially capable of receiving a valuation of up to $150 billion.
