Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix stocks plunged on Thursday as investors shifted focus from chip supply to the customers financing the artificial intelligence boom.
Samsung fell 9.3% and SK Hynix 11% in Seoul, helping push the KOSPI down more than 7%.
The rout followed a bruising Wall Street session in which hotter US inflation and sharp losses in AI infrastructure stocks revived concerns about the returns on enormous data-centre spending.
AI customers become the new risk
This week, Samsung and SK Hynix faced fears that China’s CXMT could ease memory scarcity and pressure prices. Thursday added another risk further down the supply chain.
CoreWeave dropped about 16% on Wednesday , while Nebius fell 11%, Oracle 9% and Dell 11%. Together, they erased roughly $80 billion in market value.
“We’re getting a whole lot of information suggesting that the largest AI companies may not be generating the earnings or revenue people anticipated,” Bokeh Capital Partners chief investment officer Kim Forrest told Reuters.
That concern changes how Korean memory stocks are priced. Weak AI monetisation raises doubts about data-centre returns.
Lower expected returns make future capital expenditure harder to justify, which can eventually affect demand for accelerators, servers and high-bandwidth memory.
There is no evidence Samsung or SK Hynix have suddenly lost major orders, but the market is repricing the risk that future demand growth becomes less certain.
CoreWeave debt raises funding fears
Financing has become the second pressure point.
CoreWeave had about $52 billion of debt and lease obligations at the end of June. One unsecured bond was yielding close to 15% this week as investors demanded a larger premium for financing the company’s expansion.
CreditSights analyst Jordan Chalfin highlighted the mismatch between long data-centre leases and shorter customer contracts.
“If there’s an overbuild, why would customers renew their contract with CoreWeave?” he told the Financial Times.
That question matters beyond one cloud provider, as Samsung and SK Hynix sit upstream from companies spending heavily on AI infrastructure. Those customers, or their customers, ultimately need profitable AI workloads to justify continuous expansion.
Hotter US inflation has made that calculation harder. September CPI rose 3.7%, above expectations, pushing investors to reconsider the path for interest rates and the cost of financing capital-intensive technology projects.
Memory demand still looks strong
The counterargument is that current semiconductor demand remains remarkably robust.
ASML said this week that AI-driven demand for chipmaking equipment is running ahead of planned capacity through 2028 , with customers already discussing requirements for 2029 and 2030.
TSMC is also expected to report another record quarter, supported by strong AI infrastructure spending.
Kiwoom Securities researcher Han Ji-young said Korean stocks were being pressured as “US AI infrastructure stocks exposed to profitability uncertainty” plunged together.
He nevertheless expects technical dip-buying after seven consecutive sessions of steep declines and sees TSMC’s results as a potential stabilising catalyst.
That captures the tension. Current demand remains strong, but equity markets discount what happens next.
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