KOSPI Surges Toward Record High as Nvidia's Blockbuster Earnings Ignite Rally in Samsung and SK Hynix Shares

SEOUL — South Korea's benchmark KOSPI index climbed sharply Thursday after Nvidia's latest earnings report reassured investors that demand for artificial intelligence chips remains robust, sending shares of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to fresh highs and pulling the broader market back toward the 7,000 mark.

The KOSPI was trading at 6,899.50 as of 2:41 p.m. local time, up 1.34%, or 91.29 points, for the session. The gain came after a much stronger open, with the index jumping 2.76% at the start of trading to 6,996.12, before some of those gains were pared back through the day.

Nvidia's results set the tone

The rally traces directly back to Nvidia's quarterly report, released after the U.S. market close Wednesday. The chip giant beat Wall Street's revenue and earnings expectations and signaled that shortages in advanced memory chips are likely to persist through fiscal 2028, a forecast that reinforced investor confidence in the artificial intelligence spending cycle that has powered much of this year's rally in Korean tech stocks.

Analysts had been watching the report closely, given how tightly Korea's two largest chipmakers are woven into Nvidia's supply chain. Nvidia's high-bandwidth memory order guidance was seen as a direct signal for the forward trajectories of both SK Hynix and Samsung, and Nvidia's commentary on chip demand carried outsized weight for a market that has already priced in years of rapid growth.

Chip giants lead the charge

Domestic chip bellwethers powered Thursday's advance. Samsung Electronics traded at 270,000 won early in the session, up 3.25%, while SK Hynix rose 5.45% to 1.78 million won, according to Korea Exchange data. The buying spread across the broader semiconductor supply chain, lifting shares of SK Square, Samsung Electro-Mechanics and Hanmi Semiconductor as well.

SK Hynix also had company-specific news working in its favor. The chipmaker said Wednesday it plans to invest 21.6 trillion won, or roughly $15.07 billion, to build a new production facility in Yongin, and separately announced a partnership with SanDisk Corp. to develop high-bandwidth flash memory, which the company described as a next-generation storage architecture that will be central to future AI development.

Samsung, meanwhile, has been pushing its own advanced memory ambitions, having unveiled its next-generation HBM4 memory chip earlier this week as it works to tighten its position in the AI accelerator market alongside SK Hynix.

Foreign investors return as buyers

Thursday's advance also marked a shift in investor positioning. Foreign investors, who had been net sellers in the sessions leading up to Nvidia's report, returned as buyers Thursday, helping drive the index higher alongside continued institutional demand, according to Korea Exchange data cited by Seoul Economic Daily.

That reversal is notable given how volatile the KOSPI has been in recent weeks. The index tumbled more than 22% in July in a correction that pushed it into bear market territory, and it fell sharply again earlier this week as investors grew anxious ahead of Nvidia's report, with the KOSPI dropping 2.7% and SK Hynix shedding more than 4% in a single session on fears that the AI trade had become overextended after gains of well over 200% in some individual stocks.

A blockbuster year despite the swings

Even with the sharp swings, the KOSPI remains one of the best-performing major stock indexes in the world this year. The index has climbed more than 55% in 2026, according to Trading Economics, building on a 76% surge the previous year that was already its strongest annual gain since 1999. It opened the year at a record high above 4,300 and had briefly surpassed 6,000 before the summer pullback.

Behind that run has been what analysts describe as a historic profit cycle for Korea's semiconductor industry. Goldman Sachs Research raised its 12-month KOSPI target to 9,000 earlier this year, citing a "once-in-a-generation surge in semiconductor earnings" tied to a memory supercycle driven by record shortfalls in memory chips, hyperscaler demand and the broader AI compute buildout. Timothy Moe, the firm's chief Asia Pacific regional equity strategist, wrote that "Korea is our highest-conviction view" among the region's markets.

A market defined by AI dependence

The scale of Thursday's rally underscores how closely tied South Korea's stock market has become to a single technological trend. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together represent an outsized share of the KOSPI's market capitalization, meaning swings in either company's fortunes — or in the broader AI chip cycle — can move the entire index. That dynamic has made Nvidia's quarterly reports, once a distinctly American market event, into one of the most closely watched catalysts on the Korean trading calendar.

For now, that dependence is working in the market's favor. With Nvidia's warning of continued memory shortages extending investor optimism about pricing power for Samsung and SK Hynix, traders appeared willing to look past this week's earlier volatility and push the benchmark back toward the record territory it touched earlier this year.

Trading continued Thursday afternoon in Seoul, with investors weighing how much of the initial rally would hold into the close after the index gave back roughly half of its opening gain over the course of the session.