Imagine if Apple, by itself, made up more than 40% of the entire US stock market. That’s essentially what’s happening in Taiwan right now, except the company in question is TSMC. And across the strait in South Korea, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together account for 42.2% of the KOSPI. Two countries, three companies, and an AI boom that has turned their stock markets into something closer to semiconductor ETFs than diversified national exchanges.
The KOSPI recently closed at a record 4,457.52, climbing 3.43% in a single session. Taiwan’s benchmark has followed a similar trajectory. The reason is straightforward: the world needs AI chips, and these three companies sit at the center of that supply chain.
The concentration problem nobody minds (for now)
Samsung Electronics has reached a $1 trillion market cap, propelled by surging demand for AI-related memory chips. SK Hynix, which manufactures the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that power Nvidia’s data center GPUs, has seen its stock price surge alongside it. Together they represent 42.2% of the KOSPI.
Taiwan’s situation is even more extreme. TSMC, the world’s dominant contract chipmaker, now constitutes over 40% of the island’s total market capitalization. Every major AI chip designer, from Nvidia to AMD to Apple, relies on TSMC’s fabrication plants to turn silicon wafers into functioning processors.
