Asian chip stocks sold off hard on Thursday morning as the previous day’s hot US inflation print travelled into the region’s most crowded trade. South Korea’s Kospi opened down 5.59 percent at 5,673.01 before paring the loss to about 4.5 percent, putting the index at its lowest since July and on course for its longest losing streak in two years after a sixth straight down session on Wednesday. Samsung Electronics fell about 5.4 percent in early trade and SK Hynix about 6.6 percent, with CNBC putting Hynix’s intraday fall at 8 percent, while Samsung Electro-Mechanics and Hanmi Semiconductor dropped more than 8 percent. In Tokyo the Nikkei 225 fell as much as 2.39 percent, with Kioxia down about 8 percent and SoftBank Group down about 7 percent.
The trigger was the same one that hit Wall Street on Wednesday. US consumer prices rose 3.7 percent from a year earlier in September and core prices 2.6 percent, both above forecasts, and traders marked up the odds of a Federal Reserve rate hike in October. US chip shares had already fallen sharply, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index down 4.3 percent, the S&P 500 down 1.11 percent and the Nasdaq down 1.88 percent, and US futures extended the losses in Asian hours while Treasuries gained.
Rates are only half the story Seoul is trading on. Analysts cited by Seoul Economic Daily said the market’s test for the AI cycle is shifting from the size of spending to cash generation, pointing to a Gartner warning that trillions of dollars of AI infrastructure investment face impairment risk by 2030 and to CoreWeave’s 15 percent fall in the US session. TSMC reports earnings later on Thursday, and Seoul analysts framed the results as the session’s turning point: a strong print is the nearest available evidence that the buildout still pays, and a weak one would hand the rout a second leg.