Trillion-Dollar Chipmaker SK Hynix Lands on Nasdaq

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0:33South Korean chip giant SK Hynix lands on the Nasdaq, the latest blockbuster AI listing. Plus, the EU says Meta failed to protect Instagram and Facebook users from harm caused by addictive apps. And Israel shares details of an Iranian plot to kill President Trump. We did see during the big funeral for the Iranian Ayatollah Khamenei, people were chanting, calling for Trump's death. There was even a banner that read, we will kill Trump. So some of this was out there. What the Israelis are saying is that there was a specific plot, something more concrete. It's Friday, July 10th. I'm Daniel Bach for The Wall Street Journal, filling in for Luke Vargas.

1:10And here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. The artificial intelligence boom is showing no sign of letting up, with memory chipmaker SK Hynix raising more than$26 billion for its U.S. listing today. The South Korean shipmaker is the latest global company to surpass$1 trillion in market value, and the Nasdaq listing could supercharge its business by giving it access to the world's deepest pool of capital. For more on this, I'm joined by Asia Business and Finance Editor, Peter Landers. Peter, this is a blockbuster listing, and it seems investors are quite keen to get in on the trade.

1:47Yeah, I think you'll see a lot of U.S. investors taking an interest in this company. Until now, it's been traded only in the South Korean stock exchange. And so, for the most part, American investors have been watching from the sidelines as it surpassed$1 trillion in market cap. Now, they can simply buy an ADR on NASDAQ, and it's very easy. So, I think investors who maybe are looking for more AI-related companies will certainly take a look at SK Hynix. And the money that SK Hynix is trying to raise would rank among the biggest share sales in history. What do we know about what they plan to do with that money?

2:21SK Hynix is raising more than$26 billion from U.S. investors, and they've said they principally plan to spend it in their home country of South Korea, building more memory chip factories, buying more equipment for their factories just to expand capacity, because the biggest issue for the company right now is they don't have enough product to serve to their customers. The customer is demanding more and more memory chips, and the Trump administration is probably looking to get them to invest even more in the U.S. and perhaps build some of their core products at U.S. factories. They are not saying that the money raised in this listing will be used for U.S.

2:58factories, but perhaps in the future, if they raise even more money from U.S. investors, they might consider investing further in the U.S. production. And those capacity questions and the sheer cost of the build-out to meat demand has also fueled recent volatility in tech stocks. What do you make of the timing from SK Hynix here? I think they want to take advantage of this AI boom. In South Korea, shares of SK Hynix have been up, I think, more than eight times over the past year. And a lot of U.S. investors want to get in on that growth story. The profits of this company, SK Hynix, are enormous.

3:30Analysts expect it to reach near the$150 billion of net income this year. And that's quite a feat for a company that was losing money three years ago. The risk here is that the AI growth story turns around and the profits and revenue that these companies have been seeing and the incredible growth suddenly comes to a halt. Maybe there's too much AI investment. You see a lot of companies building data centers in anticipation of future demand by companies, but the cash flow going into AI has not yet matched the valuations of the companies in this business. And the assumption is that a huge amount of money, cash, will be given to these AI companies in return for their AI services.

4:16And if there's any doubt cast on that growth story, then the whole structure underlying the AI boom in the stock market could fall apart. And that would affect everyone, whether it be Anthropic or OpenAI, SK Hynix, Microsoft, the hyperscalers, Google, NVIDIA, and many others. All of these companies are part of ultimately the same industry. And if the industry's growth prospects are clouded, then they all fall together, undoubtedly. Asia Business and Finance Editor Peter Landers there. Peter, thanks for this. You bet. A European Union investigation has found that Meta's Instagram and Facebook didn't do enough to protect users from the physical and mental harm of the platform's addictive designs.

5:01EU reporter Kim McRail has been looking at the findings and says the bloc is claiming META breached the Digital Services Act by not assessing and mitigating risks to users. This is an investigation that's been going on for some time by the EU, looking at what it says is the addictive design of META's platforms. So they talk about some measures that META did put in place, but they essentially say that those didn't go far enough. And they say that based on their findings so far, it looks to them like Meta will need to make further design changes to the platforms in Europe if they're going to be compliant with the law.

5:36Meta basically faces a risk at this stage of a significant fine. There's still a little bit of process ahead where Meta has the opportunity to respond to the charges and defend itself. And then the EU will make a final determination of whether or not they did indeed breach the law and whether or not to issue a fine. If they do issue a fine, the fine could be as much as 6 % of Meta's global revenue. The findings come after verdicts in New Mexico and California that found Meta was liable for harm that its platforms inflicted. And thousands of similar lawsuits have been filed in state and federal courts.

6:10Meta previously said it disagrees with the verdicts and that it would appeal. While finding ways to keep subscribers on the app longer has recently become a key focus at Netflix, after subscriber engagement showed signs of decline. We've reported that company executives are discussing adding live channels or subscription bundles to their offering, including NBCUniversal's Peacock. Rivals Amazon and Apple have long sold subscriptions to other streaming services through their apps. Here's Journal Deputy Media Editor Jessica Tunkel. This is sort of the evolution of a shift Netflix has been making for quite some time.

6:46Back in the day, the co-founder and former CEO Reed Hastings was all about simplicity. Let's keep it really basic. Just give people what they want, which is shows and movies. Let's not clutter it. But then they started doing things like they added advertising a few years ago, which he was vehemently against initially and then said, well, we have to change to evolve with the times. They've recently added podcasts. They've also added games. So they are shifting as the market needs them to shift. and they've always prided themselves on experimenting with new things. So in that sense, it's not that different from what they've been doing.

7:22While Netflix remains the industry leader among subscription streaming services, shares are down more than 40 % over the past 12 months. The relentless push for AI data centers is putting the squeeze on a group of manufacturers already under the gun. There are only four Western companies that make the highly specialized parts for turbine blades, And with aircraft manufacturers, engine makers, and hyperscalers desperate for turbines to power their jets and data centers, demand is soaring. But as Heard on the Street columnist Jinju Lee explains, that isn't pushing manufacturers that make turbine parts to boost production.

7:56Quick production ramps are difficult in this industry because, first of all, it's very capital intensive. It's largely because these are very technically challenging parts to make. It requires a lot of precision, especially the parts that go into jet engines, because they need to withstand the extreme conditions that occur during takeoff. And the aviation industry is a cyclical one. So manufacturers are going to not want to expand capacity too quickly. And Jinju says long backlogs in both aviation and the power industry should give these manufacturers room to raise prices. So demand is soaring from the aviation sector because airlines delayed or canceled aircraft deliveries during the pandemic.

8:41But then flight demand rebounded very quickly. And so that's leading to 10-year-plus backlogs in the aerospace industry. And there's also now high demand for gas turbines used for power generation because hyperscalers are desperate for power. They're not necessarily competing for the exact same parts, but they are sourcing from the same four companies. So to some extent, they are competing for the same labor and raw material. So we could see a bidding situation where manufacturers enjoy a lot of pricing power. Coming up, the rest of the day's news, including an Iranian plot to kill the U.S. president.

9:22That story and more after the break.

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10:00We are exclusively reporting that Israel shared new intelligence with the U.S. that indicated a fresh Iranian plot to kill President Trump. Iran has vowed openly since the president's first term that it would retaliate against Trump for the assassination of a top general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. While mourners at the recent funeral of the Iranian supreme leader held banners which read, quote, we will kill Trump. Reporter Annette Pellet is in Tel Aviv and says the intelligence helps to explain some of Trump's comments at this week's NATO summit. So Trump on Wednesday was speaking to reporters in Ankara, Turkey, and he said things like they want to take out the U.S.

10:36leader, me. I saw this morning. I'm on every one of their lists. So what we understand is that in recent days, Israel shared new intelligence with the U.S. that it said, indicated there was a new plan to kill President Trump. And this helps explain, I think, some of those comments and Trump's heightened concern about his safety. We did see during the big funeral for the Iranian Ayatollah Khamenei, there were large crowds and people were chanting, calling for Trump's death. There was even a banner that read, we will kill Trump. So some of this was, you know, out there. What the Israelis are saying is that there was a specific plot, there was intelligence that they picked up through their channels about something more concrete.

11:16The Israeli embassy in Washington declined to comment, while Iran's mission to the UN didn't immediately respond. The White House referred the journal to comments Trump made in Turkey. Anat says details of a plot on the president's life come as relations between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has soured. These two leaders jointly started this war on Iran in a very coordinated manner. There was really unprecedented military cooperation in terms of intelligence. But really what we've seen is that while they were speaking frequently at the start of the war, they would have late night phone calls, you know, talking about intelligence and even surprising some of Trump's aides about how interested he was in this.

11:54The interests have diverged almost immediately once the war started. They both started talking about regime change. But as the war went on, it became clear that Israel wants to keep hitting Iran and wants to lead to the regime's toppling. That was its goal. while Trump was more concerned about global markets and was looking for a way out and wanted a diplomatic agreement. So we've seen the relationship really kind of splinter. There's been some very intense phone calls between the two leaders that we've reported on that included some swearing, some raising of voices. And Israel has kind of been sidelined from those negotiations.

12:27Sticking with the Middle East, President Trump's peace plan to secure Gaza and prevent the re-emergence of Hamas with 20 ,000 international peacekeepers is struggling to get off the ground. A U.S. military official and other people familiar with the plan say the promised international stabilization force for Gaza is finding roadblocks in deploying even an initial group of just 10 to 20 troops. The Moroccan soldiers were meant to be deployed in June, but are now expected within months, and even then won't go into Gaza straight away, where 2.1 million people are still living among the rubble from two years of war.

13:02We're exclusively reporting that OpenAI's No. 2 executive plans to step down following medical leave, a major leadership change ahead of its planned IPO. Fiji Simo was selected by CEO Sam Altman to lead OpenAI's product and business divisions, and she was widely expected to take on an even larger role leading the company once it went public. Now Altman will have to find an alternative. Volkswagen is looking to cut its model lineup by as much as half and reduce manufacturing capacity as part of its second major overhaul in under two years. The German automaker is hoping to slash expenses as it grapples with high costs and the rising threat of Chinese competitors expanding in Europe, which resulted in its worst performance last year since 2015.

13:46And federal regulators are expected to certify the smallest version of Boeing's 737 this month. It marks a significant milestone for the planemaker, which has spent years under close regulatory scrutiny after two fatal crashes of a larger version of the plane and a mid-air door plug blowout. We also understand that the FAA is close to giving Boeing back the authority to perform final safety sign-offs of newly produced 737s. And that's it for What's News for this Friday morning. Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer. Our supervising producer is Sondra Kilhoff. And I'm Daniel Bach for The Wall Street Journal.

14:20We'll be back tonight with a new show. Until then, have a great weekend and thanks for listening.