(Bloomberg) -- Data-center infrastructure company Elice Inc. is poised to debut on South Korea’s tech-heavy Kosdaq market Tuesday, testing AI investors’ nerves after peer Firmus canceled its high-profile listing this month.
The Seoul-based neocloud service provider is slated to raise 201 billion won ($151 million) in its initial public offering, the bourse’s biggest this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Elice priced its shares at 90,500 won apiece — at the top of the marketed range — for a post-listing market capitalization exceeding 1 trillion won.
Elice’s debut comes less than two weeks after Nvidia Corp.-backed data-center operator Firmus Grid Ltd. pulled its planned IPO. Investor worries about rising borrowing costs, fierce competition and long-term returns from massive AI-related spending are hitting valuations and upending IPO plans around the globe: Coreweave Inc.’s shares have more than halved since their May peak. Nscale Ltd. is facing opposition to the valuation target it’s pursuing in its IPO, Bloomberg News reported.
To win over investors, Elice pointed to a 200% surge in first-half revenue to 34.4 billion won in its prospectus. The company swung to an operating profit of 10.3 billion won, while earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization jumped more than 11-fold to 23.2 billion won. The company is expected to record an 83% sales jump in 2026 and an operating margin of about 33%, analyst Douglas Kim wrote in a note on Smartkarma.
Founded in 2015 by three students in local top tech university KAIST’s doctorate program, Elice began as a coding education platform before pivoting to AI cloud infrastructure, supplying products including servers, liquid-cooled chips, cloud and networking infrastructure and software. The company has since developed a modular data center platform with high-density power systems and advanced liquid cooling designed for high-performance AI chip clusters.