Not your usual AI trade
If you’ve been treating the AI boom like a pure U.S. tech party, South Korea just kicked the door open. The iShares South Korea ETF has ripped 104.04% year to date through May 27, while the Nasdaq 100 proxy, QQQ, is up just 18.75%. That’s an 85-point gap — the kind of spread that makes even old dot-com charts do a double take.
Two stocks, one giant rocket booster
Here’s the plot twist: this isn’t a broad, beautiful parade of Korean winners. It’s mostly SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics doing the heavy lifting. Together they make up 52.94% of EWY, and together they’ve turned the fund into a monster.
- SK Hynix is up 245.24% this year in won terms
- Samsung Electronics is up 156.57%
- Both crossed the $1 trillion market cap mark this month
That makes South Korea the first country outside the U.S. to have more than one publicly traded trillion-dollar company at the same time. Not bad for a market a lot of folks still mentally file under “emerging” out of habit.
The real star: memory chips
The engine here is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM — the fancy chip stuff sitting next to Nvidia’s accelerators in AI servers. SK Hynix says its entire 2026 HBM allocation is sold out, and Samsung is racing to expand capacity by roughly 50% this year. In other words: if AI is the movie, memory chips are the snack bar, the ticket booth, and the guy selling T-shirts.
Why you should care
This is a reminder that the AI trade isn’t just about who designs the flashy chips. The suppliers behind the scenes can capture a lot of the upside — sometimes more than the household-name U.S. giants in the benchmark. Big picture: if the AI buildout stays hot, the winners may keep showing up far beyond Silicon Valley.