South Korea surges past Canada to become the 7th-largest stock market in the world amid AI boom
The country’s two chip giants have seen their shares more than double this year.
South Korea’s stock market has muscled its way into the world’s top 7, powered by an AI chip rally that has propelled it past two major markets in a matter of weeks.
According to Bloomberg data, the country’s listed companies now have a combined market capitalization of $4.59 trillion, edging past Canada’s $4.5 trillion to become the world’s seventh-largest equity market, about 10 days after overtaking the UK.
With a remarkable 71% surge in value this year, the country now sits behind only the US, China, Japan, Hong Kong, India, and Taiwan, which remains just ahead with a market value of around $4.66 trillion.
South Korea’s rapid rise has been led by Samsung Electronics, which crossed the $1 trillion valuation mark this week following its record first-quarter earnings — and reports that Apple is exploring Samsung as a potential US chipmaking partner.
SK Hynix, Korea’s second-largest company and the world’s leading high-bandwidth memory (HBM) supplier, also saw its shares rally more than 10% earlier this week after US tech giants including Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon raised their AI data center spending forecasts.
While Nvidia may have been the original face of the AI boom, much of the memory that powers its chips comes from South Korea. Samsung and SK Hynix together control roughly 80% of global HBM supply, producing the memory chips that Big Tech is racing to pack into new data centers.
That scramble has sent memory prices soaring, more than doubling the shares of both Samsung and SK Hynix this year and helping propel the tech-heavy KOSPI above 7,000 for the first time. The two companies now account for nearly half of the benchmark’s total weighting.
