South Korea’s stock market has roughly tripled in value compared to a year ago, riding a wave of AI chip demand that has turned Seoul into one of the hottest equity markets on the planet.
The KOSPI index broke through 7,000 points for the first time in May 2026, posting year-to-date gains in the range of 90-100%. It has since pushed past 8,000 and approached 9,000 in the months that followed.
Two companies are doing all the heavy lifting
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together account for roughly 40% of the entire KOSPI index’s weighting. SK Hynix shares have surged more than 340% during this rally, driven by insatiable global demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, the specialized semiconductors that power AI training and inference workloads. Samsung’s market capitalization has crossed $1 trillion.
Retail investors have piled in aggressively. During the 2020-2021 pandemic-era rally, Korean retail traders earned the nickname “ants” for their collective market-moving power. This time around, the ants are back in force, joined by significant foreign capital inflows chasing the AI semiconductor narrative.
