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GlobalFoundries Inc. priced its initial public offering at $47 a share late Wednesday, at the top of its forecast range.

Last week, GlobalFoundries priced its expected range at between $42 and $47 a share.

The company's pricing Wednesday values the company at $25.1 billion based on 534.7 million shares outstanding. Shares will be listed under the ticker "GFS" and are scheduled to start trading on the Nasdaq on Thursday.

The Malta, N.Y.-headquartered silicon wafer foundry -- known as a fabrication plant or "fab" in industry parlance -- is launching its IPO at a time when the world is still working its way through a global chip shortage, and fabs still have long backorders from customers.

Third-party fabs like GlobalFoundries make silicon wafers for the majority of chip makers that do not have their own fabs -- companies like Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Apple Inc. and Nvidia Corp. In fact, GlobalFoundries was a spin off of AMD when the company wanted to get out of the fab business.

While 2021 shaping up to be the biggest IPO market ever in terms of proceeds, the Renaissance IPO ETF is up about 4% year-to-date, compared with a 21% gain on the S&P 500 index , and an 18% gain on the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index .