Korea's KOSPI fell roughly 8% today, triggering circuit breakers for the 10th time this year, something local coverage is already calling "Black Thursday." Our own Asian AI Highlight tracking caught the same thing from a different angle: the 33 Korean companies we track averaged -10.09% today. China's 6 tracked chip names averaged just -0.72%, and two of them closed green.
The damage was concentrated in chip-equipment and packaging names. Techwing fell 17.5%, Eugene Technology fell 16.6%, TLB fell 15.9%, and Hanmi Semiconductor fell 11.6%. Even Samsung Electronics, the index's anchor, fell 9.5%. Foreign investors net-sold roughly 3.62 trillion won on the day.
Two things compounded. On Oct 12, ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) unveiled a new 4F² DRAM cell architecture at a conference in Shanghai, the same story we wrote about three days ago when SanDisk, Micron and SK Hynix all sold off on it. That announcement is specifically about China closing the gap in memory, the business Samsung and SK Hynix dominate. Today's KOSPI move looks like that threat landing on Korean equipment and packaging suppliers, not just the memory makers themselves. On top of that, yesterday's hot CPI print, the same one we covered in our CoreWeave/tech-selloff piece, is still working through global markets, and semiconductors worldwide are getting hit by the same rate-driven repricing.
China's basket wasn't all green. Naura Technology Group gained 3.95% and AMEC gained 0.89%, both chip-equipment makers. SMIC, the foundry, gained 1.84%. Cambricon, which designs AI chips rather than making the equipment that produces them, fell 3.43%. The names that benefit most directly from China's push to build its own chip-equipment supply chain held up or gained; the more speculative AI-chip-design name didn't get the same pass.
The domestic-equipment story has been building for a while. China's chip-equipment localization rate rose from roughly 25% in 2024 to 35% by the end of 2025, ahead of its own target, and Naura's order backlog was up 58% year-over-year as of Q1. The same CXMT breakthrough that hurt Korean suppliers today is, from Beijing's side, evidence that the localization push is working. A memory competitor to Samsung and SK Hynix also validates the equipment makers that supply it.
Our own tracked data, broken down by market: Korea averaged -10.09% across 33 companies, Taiwan averaged -3.79% across 5, and China averaged -0.72% across 6. The honest framing isn't "China closed positive while Korea sold off." China's basket was still net negative. What the data actually shows is that China's resilience was concentrated in the companies with the clearest structural reason to be resilient, chip-equipment and foundry names riding a self-sufficiency push, while Korea took a direct hit to the business it built its tech sector around.
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