Asian AI Stocks Rebound: Kospi Jumps 4.7% After Selloff
2 min readAsia’s AI trade found its footing on Tuesday. South Korea’s Kospi jumped 4.7 percent to 6,821.41, clawing back a 4.5 percent drop from the day before, while Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 added 2.8 percent and Taiwan’s Taiex rose 3.6 percent. After a brutal month for anything connected to AI chips, the region caught a breath.
How the selloff started
The Kospi is up more than 50 percent this year, an extraordinary run built almost entirely on memory and chipmaking stocks. That concentration cut both ways. Over the past month the index shed more than 20 percent as investors locked in profits and started worrying aloud about a bubble in AI spending.
The anxiety was regional, not just Korean. Semiconductor names in Taiwan, Japan and the United States all sold off inside the same stretch, and analysts have been warning that Asian markets are dangerously dependent on a handful of star stocks: Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and TSMC.
Tuesday’s rebound
Samsung Electronics surged 7.4 percent and memory maker SK Hynix gained 6.4 percent, per Associated Press reporting from Hong Kong. In Tokyo, returning from a Monday holiday, memory maker Kioxia Holdings led with a 15.9 percent jump, chip testing firm Advantest rose 6.9 percent, and OpenAI investor SoftBank Group climbed 6.1 percent. Tokyo Electron added 1.3 percent.
Taiwan’s TSMC advanced 2.8 percent. Elsewhere the mood was flatter: Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was essentially unchanged, the Shanghai Composite added 0.6 percent, and India’s Sensex slipped 0.1 percent.
Why it matters
Asian exchanges are where the AI buildout gets priced in real time, because the companies that actually manufacture the memory and the accelerators are listed in Seoul, Tokyo and Taipei. When sentiment turns, it shows up here first and hardest.
One green session does not settle the bubble argument. Hyperscalers are still guiding to roughly $725 billion in AI capital spending this year, and until that translates into visible returns, these markets will keep swinging on every earnings report and capex revision. Watch whether the rebound holds through the next round of guidance.