Elice prices KOSDAQ IPO at top end, raising $150M for AI data centres
What's the deal? AI infrastructure company Elice has priced its KOSDAQ initial public offering (IPO) at US$75.9 per share, the top of its US$62–US$75.9 range. The offering of 2,222,000 new shares raises about US$168.6M (roughly $150 million) and implies a market capitalisation near US$842.9M.
Why now? Institutional demand was strong: book-building drew a competition ratio of about 389 to 1, with 97.3% of bids by volume at or above the top of the range. Retail subscriptions run on the 7th and 8th, with a KOSDAQ listing planned this month.
The numbers: Elice's cloud business has swung from about 7% of revenue in 2023 to 76% in the first half of this year. First-half consolidated revenue reached US$28.8M with operating profit of US$8.64M — already topping last year's full-year operating profit of about US$4.36M.
What's the endgame? Founded in 2015 as an AI education platform, Elice has pivoted into GPU-based AI cloud, data centres, and AI transformation (AX) solutions. It plans to channel IPO proceeds into expanding data centre power and cooling.
The company runs a 10MW data centre in greater Seoul and has secured 130MW of total power intake capacity, split across 40MW in the southwest and 80MW in the southeast. It also aims to combine modular AI data centres with its own infrastructure software.
Who's involved? Mirae Asset SecuritiesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → is lead underwriter, with Samsung SecuritiesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → as co-lead. Elice is pushing overseas through subsidiaries in the United States, Singapore, and Japan.
The signal: Elice's top-priced listing shows investor appetite for AI infrastructure plays, even from companies that began elsewhere. Its rapid cloud pivot — and the race for data centre power capacity — mirrors a broader scramble to own the compute underpinning the AI boom.
Read more: biz.chosun.com
Image credit: GBPublic_PR
