South Korea Daily Briefing

The Korean market's -3% decline traced directly to the Nvidia HBM demand thesis. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix supply virtually all of Nvidia's High Bandwidth Memory requirement for Blackwell GPUs — a supply chain relationship that becomes a valuation risk when Nvidia's forward capex guidance is uncertain under a new CEO. Chosun Ilbo reported that SK Hynix and Samsung shares are down from their recent peaks but analysts see the selldown as overdone given confirmed Blackwell production orders extending 18 months. The key question is whether interim CEO Colette Kress maintains the AI infrastructure spending commitment in her first investor communication.

Korea Economic Daily's CIO roundtable — typically a bellwether for Korean institutional sentiment — called US equities a dot-com-style bubble and flagged AI as facing a reality check. The comparison is pointed: in 2000, the KOSPI fell 70% in the year following the Nasdaq peak as Korean tech conglomerates with US growth exposure repriced. The same pattern risk exists now — Samsung, SK Hynix, and LG Energy are KOSPI's $400 billion market cap anchor, and their valuations are tied to US tech capex cycles. The BoK's rate hold position provides some domestic cushion, but KRW/USD weakness above 1,400 is the external vulnerability.

뉴시스 reported that investors asking whether the Samsung/SK Hynix (삼전닉스) selloff is a panic-buying opportunity are facing the right question at the wrong time. The HBM super-cycle thesis — that AI GPU demand would absorb all DRAM/HBM capacity through 2028 — was priced at peak confidence when Jensen Huang was at Nvidia's helm. With leadership transition uncertainty, hyperscalers may delay order commitments for a quarter. The bounce key, analysts say, is Colette Kress's first analyst call: if she confirms the Blackwell production ramp and AI capex guidance unchanged, Samsung and SK Hynix snap back; if she hedges on the $400 billion ecosystem commitment, the HBM cycle resets.