By Kwanwoo Jun
South Korea's technology stocks rallied on Monday, extending their broad gains following Nvidia's artificial-intelligence deals in the Asian country last week.
Leading the advance was SK Hynix, the main supplier of high-bandwidth-memory products to Nvidia. Its shares jumped 11% to close at a record 620,000 won. Samsung Electronics climbed 3.3% and internet giant Naver rose 2.6%.
The strong gains by large-cap tech stocks helped drive the benchmark Kospi to an all-time high, with the index ending 2.8% higher.
The rally followed a string of deals Nvidia forged on Friday in South Korea, which will see a total of 260,000 of its new AI chips deployed in data centers, smart factories, autonomous vehicles and robotics across the country.
The partnerships with the Korean government and some of the country's largest companies--including Samsung, Hyundai Motor and SK Group, the parent of SK Hynix--are part of Seoul's push to build out its AI capacity. President Lee Jae-myung's administration has designated the sector as one of the economy's new growth engines--and set a goal to make the country one of the world's top three AI hubs.
The Nvidia deals served as added tailwinds for major semiconductor companies, especially SK Hynix, which had delivered record quarterly earnings just days earlier. The chip-making subsidiary of SK Group posted a stellar third quarter thanks to brisk shipments of higher-end HBM3E products and higher prices for other powerful DRAM and NAND chips, including high-capacity double data rate 5 products and enterprise solid-state drives used in data servers for AI training and mobile devices.
SK Group is also partnering with Amazon Web Services to build an AI data center in Korea's southeastern industrial city of Ulsan. The AI data center will be the largest in the country when it is completed by 2027, according to SK Group. Amazon's cloud-computing arm said last week that it plans to invest the equivalent of an additional $5 billion through 2031 to expand its AI infrastructure in South Korea, bringing its total investment commitment to roughly $9 billion.
Analyst Kim Kwang-jin of Hanwha Investment & Securities expects SK Hynix to maintain its leadership in the premium HBM market. With the company set to start shipping its most advanced HBM4 products to Nvidia from the end of the year, ahead of its competitors, those chips could account for more than half the entire HBM segment in the first half of 2026, he said in a note Monday.
Last week, Nomura analysts led by C.W. Chung said that SK Hynix's book value could nearly double to 296 trillion won by the end of 2027, thanks to a supercycle boom in the semiconductor industry. They raised their operating profit forecasts for the memory-chip maker by 38% to 99 trillion won for 2026 and by 46% to 128 trillion won for 2027.
Write to Kwanwoo Jun at kwanwoo.jun@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 03, 2025 02:17 ET (07:17 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.