On October 13, 2026, South Korean chip stocks are under pressure as the Kospi briefly falls below 6,000 points and more than 7% intraday. KED Global reports that the index’s closing loss is 5.5%, while CNBC reports steep declines for SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics. The intraday drop and the closing loss describe different points in the session; KED Global reports both.
What is weighing on chip shares
The selling comes amid several concerns, not one established cause. KED Global reports that foreign investors accelerated sales of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. CNBC points to worries about competition from China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), alongside broader anxiety over AI investment and the financing of AI infrastructure.
The concern about CXMT follows reported progress on a denser DRAM cell architecture, designed to fit more memory into less chip area. CNBC quotes Phillip Wool, chief market strategist at Rayliant Global Advisors, saying CXMT has not demonstrated large-scale production. Vey-Sern Ling, senior equity advisor at UBP, says Chinese memory makers could affect global supply and demand over time but face near-term technical hurdles in advanced memory such as high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Those assessments distinguish a potential longer-term challenge from what the reported development says about production today. CNBC’s account includes both analysts’ views.
U.S. technology shares also weakened in the preceding session. On October 12, CNBC reports, the Nasdaq Composite fell 0.44% and Micron Technology shares fell 3.9%. A separate Yahoo Finance report linked concerns about AI-infrastructure financing to remarks by Broadcom CEO Hock Tan and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. Together, these reports describe a market backdrop involving AI spending, chip competition and selling pressure; they do not assign a measured share of the Kospi’s decline to any one factor.
South Korea’s earlier chip-led market drops
The October selloff follows two separate episodes of sharp Kospi volatility in June 2026. On June 8, the index fell as much as 8.8% to 7,442.73 points, and trading in KOSPI index stocks was halted for 20 minutes, according to Investing.com.
Bloomberg Television’s report on a separate June 26 episode describes a Kospi decline of as much as 9% and a 20-minute trading suspension. These June events provide earlier examples of chip-led volatility and trading interruptions in South Korean equities; they do not establish that the June and October declines shared a cause. Bloomberg Television reported on the June episode.
