AI IPO Slumps as Retail Demand Meets Share Losses

Elice Group raised 201.1 billion won in its initial public offering, but its shares fell sharply on their market debut Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026. They opened at 75,700 won, 16% below the 90,500 won IPO price, and last traded at 66,600 won, down 27%, Reuters reported. The Japan Times said the shares fell as much as 32% to 61,400 won in early trading. The KOSDAQ index fell 1%.

South Korean retail investors put roughly 10.3 trillion won into subscription deposits to seek shares, and the retail offering drew more than 400 times the shares available. Elice sold 2.22 million new shares at 90,500 won apiece, the top of its marketed price range. The Japan Times reported that the company’s post-listing market capitalization exceeded 1 trillion won.

Retail Demand, Market Losses

Elice’s first-half revenue rose 200% to 34.4 billion won, according to its prospectus. The company reported an operating profit of 10.3 billion won. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization climbed more than 11-fold to 23.2 billion won.

Analyst Douglas Kim wrote in a Smartkarma note that Elice was expected to post an 83% sales jump in 2026 and an operating margin of about 33%. Those projections accompanied a share sale that brought in 201.1 billion won, or $151.12 million, Reuters reported. The Japan Times put the proceeds at 201 billion won, or $151 million, and called the offering the bourse’s biggest IPO this year.

“While it's a company that already posts operating profit with the AI cloud business and it plans to respond to private-sector demand with the IPO proceeds, it remains to be seen whether the company can maintain its current profitability,” said Kim Dojoon, chief executive officer at Zian Investment Management. He said CoreWeave may have weakened investor sentiment, but Elice’s financial structure was “quite different from CoreWeave.”

Expansion Backed by IPO Proceeds

Elice plans to use the proceeds to build more AI data centers in South Korea and abroad, Chief Executive Officer Jae Won Kim said. “We're going all-in on becoming a full-stack AI infrastructure leader globally,” Kim said in an interview. “This IPO is about giving ourselves the financial firepower to execute.”

Venture capital firms including Vertex Ventures and Altos Ventures back the company. Mirae Asset Securities and Samsung Securities served as lead underwriters. Three students in KAIST’s doctorate program founded Elice in 2015. It started as a coding education platform, then shifted to AI cloud infrastructure.

Its products include servers, liquid-cooled chips, cloud and networking equipment, and software. Elice also developed a modular data-center platform featuring high-density power systems and advanced liquid cooling for high-performance AI chip clusters.

A Weakened IPO Market

Elice’s debut tested investor appetite for AI and data-center companies after an AI-led market selloff derailed some deals. The Japan Times reported that borrowing costs, competition and questions about long-term returns from AI spending weighed on valuations. Firmus Grid canceled its planned Sydney listing that month. CoreWeave shares had more than halved since their May peak, while AirTrunk was delaying a planned IPO of a real estate investment trust, people familiar with the matter said. Nscale faced pushback over its target IPO valuation, the report said.

“Elice's debut comes at a time when sentiment toward AI infrastructure companies has weakened, particularly in the U.S.,” said Albert Yong, managing partner and chief investment officer at Petra Capital Management. “Sentiment toward AI infrastructure has been highly volatile and often disconnected from underlying fundamentals.”

First-time listings in Seoul raised $1.4 billion in 2026, compared with more than $3 billion in each of the previous three years, according to Bloomberg-compiled data. The reports described no union, strike, labor response or government policy proposal tied to the offering. They identified IPO proceeds, investor demand, company earnings and data-center expansion plans as the central details of Elice’s listing.