Asia’s AI Chip Selloff: Memory Giants Plunge
2 min readAsia’s biggest chipmakers took a brutal hit this week as an AI chip selloff swept through the market, with investors dumping the semiconductor stocks that had powered one of the year’s strongest rallies. South Korea’s SK Hynix closed nearly 15 percent lower on July 28, while Samsung Electronics fell more than 13 percent.
Inside the AI Chip Selloff
The rout spread across the region. SoftBank Group, widely treated as a proxy for AI investment through its stake in chip designer Arm, slid more than 4 percent. Japan’s memory maker Kioxia plunged over 18 percent, and Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s most important contract chipmaker, closed almost 3 percent lower. Across the global industry, chip names including Nvidia, Micron, and AMD each shed more than $100 billion in market value.
Why the Memory Trade Wobbled
The companies at the center of the drop make high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, the specialized chips that feed data to AI accelerators. SK Hynix and Samsung dominate that market, and their shares had soared on expectations of near-endless AI demand. When investors began questioning whether that demand, and the prices attached to it, could hold, the same names that led the rally led the retreat.
The reversal is striking because it lands just weeks after Samsung and SK Hynix pledged trillions of won toward new chip clusters in South Korea, betting the AI cycle has years left to run.
Why It Matters
Asia sits at the heart of the AI supply chain. The memory and manufacturing capacity that trains and runs frontier models comes largely from Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, so shaken confidence in these stocks is really a question about the durability of the entire AI build-out. If HBM demand holds, this week looks like a dip. If it softens, the correction could deepen.
For now, the region’s chip giants remain committed to their long-term spending plans. The market is simply asking, out loud, whether the AI hardware boom has run ahead of itself.