TRO | SK Hynix Surpasses SpaceX With The Largest Ever US Foreign Listing

Plus, OpenAI Launches GPT-5.6 With Three New Models and Lovable Is In Talks To Double Its Valuation In Under A Year

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Meliora Company
July 13, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

 Subscribe | 13th July, 2026

In this fast-moving Vertical AI economy, headlines are everywhere but optimism is rare.

Here’s our take on 3 stories that will help you be relentlessly optimistic about the future.

1. SK Hynix Raises US$26.5 Billion, The Largest Ever US Listing By A Foreign Company

South Korean memory chip maker SK Hynix has raised US$26.5 billion in its Nasdaq listing, selling 177.9 million American depositary shares at US$149 each - the largest ever US share offering by a foreign firm, surpassing SpaceX's record from June. SK Hynix is one of Nvidia's most critical suppliers, providing the high-bandwidth memory chips that power AI infrastructure at scale. Demand for the offering was more than seven times oversubscribed. Both SK Hynix and Samsung now carry market valuations exceeding US$1 trillion, joining Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet in that group.

Here’s why this matters: The SK Hynix listing is the clearest signal yet that the AI supply chain is entering a new phase of public market maturity. Memory chips are not the headline act of the AI story, but they are the infrastructure without which no AI system runs at scale. Investor demand seven times the available supply confirms that sophisticated capital is moving beyond the model layer and into the hardware ecosystem that supports it. For the telecoms and technology industries, SK Hynix's US$26.5 billion raise and South Korea's broader US$880 billion domestic investment plan signals that the geography of AI infrastructure is expanding well beyond Silicon Valley. The supply chain for the AI economy is becoming a genuinely global asset class.

2. OpenAI Launches GPT-5.6 With Three New Models: Sol, Terra and Luna

OpenAI has launched GPT-5.6, a family of three models: Sol, its new flagship; Terra, a balanced everyday model at half the cost of GPT-5.5; and Luna, its fastest and most affordable option. Sol sets new benchmarks in coding, biology, and cybersecurity, and its launch followed a two-week government-gated preview period at the request of the US administration. Alongside the model launch, OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT Work - an agentic enterprise tool powered by GPT-5.6 that connects to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, SharePoint, email, calendars, and CRM platforms to automate multi-step workplace tasks.

Here’s why this matters: The GPT-5.6 family arrives with two stories running in parallel. The first is the model itself: Sol's performance on long-horizon agentic tasks and cybersecurity benchmarks puts it in direct competition with Claude Fable 5, which only restored global access last week. The second is the precedent being set around government oversight of model releases. OpenAI coordinated this launch with the White House under a new executive order requiring federal agencies to assess AI capabilities before public release. That framework, applied consistently, means every frontier model launch is now subject to government review. For the industry heading into an IPO window, that is a structural shift worth watching closely.

3. Lovable Double Its Valuation In Under A Year

Lovable, the Stockholm-based vibe coding start-up, is reportedly in talks to raise US$300 million at a US$13.2 billion valuation, exactly double the US$6.6 billion it achieved last December, in a round expected to be led by Menlo Ventures. The less-than-three-year-old company hit US$500 million in annualised revenue in June and counts Workday, Asana, and Nvidia among its enterprise customers. The raise follows SpaceX's acquisition of rival Cursor for US$60 billion last month, leaving Lovable as the most valuable independent vibe coding company in the market.

Here’s why this matters: Vibe coding has moved from novelty to the most commercially valuable AI use case in the market in under two years. Lovable doubling its valuation in seven months, while Cursor exits to SpaceX for US$60 billion and Replit is valued at US$9 billion, confirms that the market for natural language software development is real, large, and consolidating fast. For the media and technology industries, the implications extend beyond the start-up ecosystem. If building software no longer requires writing code, the barrier between having an idea and shipping a product collapses. That changes who builds, what gets built, and how fast the next wave of digital products arrives.

Cannes Yacht Talks - Meliora’s Clive Dickens on Sovereign AI

US$700 billion dollars into AI infrastructure. 1.5 billion weekly users. But do you know where your AI was trained?

At the 2026 Cannes Lions IV.AI Yacht Talks, Meliora International Managing Partner Clive Dickens makes the case for why the provenance of your AI will matter as much as the AI itself.

Still Curious?

Our Pursuit Of Better

Prime Intellect, a San Francisco-based start-up, has raised US$130 million in Series A funding led by Accel to help enterprises build, train, and deploy their own AI agents on proprietary data. The platform supports distributed training across fragmented GPU clusters, allowing companies to build sovereign AI without needing hyperscaler infrastructure. Revenue has grown 15-fold in the past year, with customers including Cisco, SAP, and several sovereign wealth funds.

Norm has reached unicorn status with a US$120 million Series C led by Khosla Ventures, valuing the New York-based AI law start-up at US$1.2 billion. Rather than billing by the hour, Norm charges clients based on outcomes. Its AI-native law firm, Norm Law, pairs AI agents with supervising human attorneys to deliver legal services to enterprise clients and is now building AI agents capable of supervising other AI agents.

QuantumDiamonds, a Munich-based spinout from the Technical University of Munich, has secured US$84 million in non-dilutive EU and German government funding alongside a US$16.5 million equity round led by World Fund. The company uses quantum sensing technology to compress chip defect detection from weeks into a two-minute inspection, without halting production lines. It has completed its first commercial deployments in Taiwan and the US.

The Pursuit of Better, Together

If this week’s newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a colleague. The best conversations often start with “You’ve got to read this”.