South Korean Semiconductor Shares Plunge As Rout Continues, Pressuring U.S. Chipmakers Further

South Korean semiconductor companies plunged on Tuesday, extending the rout chipmakers have been going through the past sessions.

SK Hynix fell almost 15%, while Samsung Electronics did so by more than 13%. CNBC noted that other AI-related names also fell at the end of the trading day. Japanese and European companies had a similar fate.

The drop is poised to drag U.S. chipmakers as well. The ongoing rout led Nvidia to stop being the world’s most valuable company on Monday, losing its spot to Apple.

The stock fell almost 5% on Monday, its valuation falling to $4.77 trillion, while Apple’s shares climbed about 1%, getting close to a $5 trillion valuation ahead of its earnings call on Thursday. The company is expected to provide information about the impact of global chip shortages, which led the company to raise prices in June.

It is the first time since June 2025 that Nvidia is not the world’s most valuable company. The trend continued on Tuesday, with Nvidia continuing losses and Apple staying on the green.

So far this year Nvidia’s stock has gained 4%, while Apple’s soared 24%. The company has outperformed the broader market largely due to its decision to rent AI capacity rather than building its own.

The company is also facing some other headwinds. Its next-generation Kyber NVL144 rack-scale AI system has reportedly been delayed by more than a year after manufacturing challenges emerged with a critical component at the center of the platform.

Alongside unprecedented demand for AI chips from cloud providers, the company has also been dealing with export restrictions affecting sales to China, while governments continue to prioritize domestic semiconductor production and supply chain resilience following years of geopolitical tensions.

According to research firm SemiAnalysis, the Kyber NVL144 rack architecture is now expected to launch in 2028 instead of its previously planned 2027 debut because the PCB midplane, a specialized multi-layer printed circuit board that links key modules inside the rack, has proved difficult to manufacture, CNBC noted.

Kyber is designed to house 144 of Nvidia’s highest-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) inside a single rack, allowing them to operate as one integrated computing system for training and running large artificial intelligence models. The system uses vertically mounted compute trays instead of the conventional horizontal arrangement to increase computing density while reducing latency. Nvidia unveiled the architecture earlier this year alongside its Vera Rubin Ultra platform during its GTC developer conference.