By Faith Hung and Wen-Yee Lee
TAIPEI, March 26 (Reuters) – Shares of Taiwanese memory chip maker Nanya Technology opened limit-up 10% on Thursday after raising about $2.5 billion in a private placement from SanDisk Technologies and others to expand advanced chip production.
The fundraising comes as chipmakers boost production capacity and their customers seek to lock in supplies through tie-ups amid a global memory chip shortage triggered by the artificial intelligence boom. That in turn has tightened supplies to a number of other industries, including smartphones, computers and automobiles.
Nanya Technology unveiled the $2.5 billion share sales late on Wednesday to SanDisk Technologies, a unit of SanDisk, SK Hynix’s Solidigm unit, Cisco Systems and Kioxia via private placement.
They were buying Nanya shares at T$223.9 per share, slightly below Wednesday’s closing price of T$226.5. Nanya shares surged on Thursday to T$249.
The company said the proceeds would be used to invest in factory facilities and production equipment for advanced memory manufacturing.
SanDisk is investing roughly T$31 billion ($969.69 million). The other three firms are investing around T$16 billion each.
Alongside the equity investment, SanDisk said it also entered into a multi-year strategic supply agreement with Nanya under which the Taiwanese firm will supply it with DRAM products.
Kioxia also said it had entered a long-term DRAM supply agreement with Nanya, citing strong growth in its solid-state drive business driven by AI demand and the need to secure stable DRAM supplies.
The fundraising followed SK Hynix’s announcement on Wednesday that it plans to list shares in the U.S. later this year, a deal that could raise as much as $14 billion.
($1 = 31.9690 Taiwan dollars)
(Reporting by Faith Hung and Wen-Yee Lee; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Miyoung Kim and Thomas Derpinghaus)
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