Samsung and SK Hynix Sink as Kospi Halts Trading

The selloff was triggered by hotter-than-expected U.S. consumer prices, which revived fears of another Federal Reserve rate hike and pushed investors to reassess richly valued AI and chip names. That macro shock landed just as doubts were building over whether the industry’s massive AI spending spree will translate into enough revenue and profit to justify the outlays.

Gartner’s estimate that roughly $7 trillion will be poured into AI infrastructure by 2030, versus as much as $3.6 trillion in related sales, added to the anxiety around returns on capital. Foreign investors responded by dumping more than 3 trillion won in a day, extending net selling to an eighth straight session and accelerating the pressure on local equities.

The move matters beyond Korea because Samsung and SK Hynix are among the clearest global proxies for memory demand, data-center buildout and AI hardware spending. When they break down this sharply, it ripples through suppliers, exporters and index-heavy portfolios across Asia and into U.S. chip shares.

Attention is now fixed on the next round of earnings from U.S. megacap tech and cloud hyperscalers, which investors are treating as the key test of whether AI demand is still outrunning costs. If those results show margins and monetization holding up, the market could get the rebound traders are looking for; if not, the rout in semiconductors may have further to run.