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Stock markets in South Korea and Taiwan have been on a wild ride lately.
Record highs, sharp drops, and dramatic swings in between.
Taiwan overtakes India as the fifth largest stock market in the world.
The KOSPI about a month ago was down 8% two days in a row
and then up 8% on the third day and then rallied to new highs.
It's especially been a roller coaster week for the KOSPI in South Korea,
now down from... There's been plenty of volatility.
But if you zoom out, the bigger picture tells another story.
Korea's KOSPI index has nearly tripled over the past year and Taiwan's TAIEX has more than doubled.
That kind of gains makes US markets look like it's a standstill.
Charlotte Yang covers Asian markets for Bloomberg.
She says the rally comes down to one thing: AI.
Tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are spending hundreds of billions a year building out AI infrastructure.
And all of that runs on advanced chips and semiconductors, many of them made in Korea and Taiwan.
We're talking about companies like Taiwan's TSMC, that's the world's largest chip foundry,
and in Korea, the edge is laser-focused on memory chips,
SK Hynix and Samsung really dominate this segment.
The explosive demand for these chips has helped turn these firms into some of the most profitable in the world.
And as these Asian chipmaker stocks kept climbing, retail investors piled in, hoping to cash in on the rally.