Samsung and SK Hynix Shrugged Off Nvidia's Seven-Day Slide

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix erased a 4.3% KOSPI plunge on Tuesday, closing the index up 0.68% even as Nvidia fell for a seventh straight session. That single fact is the most interesting thing the Korean market did on August 25, 2026, and it deserves more attention than a one-line mention in a wrap-up. For years the reflex trade has been mechanical: US chip stocks fall overnight, Korean chip stocks fall the next morning. Tuesday morning followed that script faithfully — and then the afternoon tore it up. This post looks only at that reversal: what drove it, why it could happen against the grain of US semiconductor weakness, and what would confirm or kill the more bullish reading of it.

The setup was a textbook sympathy selloff

The overnight lead-in could hardly have been worse for Korean chipmakers. Nvidia dropped 2.91% for its seventh consecutive losing session — its longest streak since September 2022 — while Micron fell 5.83% and Broadcom lost 2.63%. Warnings around AI-related regulation were cited as a backdrop to the spreading tech selloff. Notably, this was not broad US risk aversion: the Dow actually rose 0.26% to a record high while the Nasdaq fell 0.76% and the S&P 500 slipped 0.28%. The weakness was concentrated precisely in the names Korean semiconductors usually trade in sympathy with.

Seoul obliged at the open. The KOSPI started 2.40% lower at 6,535.93 and kept sliding, touching 6,408.82 — down 4.30% — at the intraday low. The KOSDAQ broke below the 800 line during the session. So far, entirely according to script.

The reversal ran against foreign money, not with it

Then the script broke. In the afternoon, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix clawed back most of their losses and pulled the index into positive territory. The KOSPI finished at 6,742.74, up 0.68% — roughly five percentage points above the intraday low. The KRX AI semiconductor theme index, which should have been the epicenter of the damage, closed up 2.14%, the second-best performer among 39 theme indices. The KOSDAQ recovered to close at 827.15, up 1.70%.

The flow data makes the reversal more striking, not less. An afternoon snapshot — taken before the final leg of the rally, so the closing figures may differ — showed foreign investors net sellers of about 3.1304 trillion won on the main board, against net buying of about 1.0087 trillion won by individuals and about 724.6 billion won by institutions. Whatever the final print shows, the shape of the day is clear: the recovery from the low was driven by domestic money absorbing a very large foreign sell order, not by foreigners changing their minds early. Individual investors buying the morning plunge were, per the reporting, a meaningful part of how the losses got trimmed.

Why Korean chips could decouple, at least for a day

A one-day divergence from Nvidia needs a domestic reason, and there is a specific one on the table. Samsung Electronics' board has approved a shareholder return program of 90 to 110 trillion won — described as its largest ever — and the market is still working through how it will be executed, including the timing of buybacks and cancellations. That interpretation process is continuing to influence the stock's direction. It matters because it gives domestic investors a reason to own Samsung that is entirely independent of the US AI narrative: a capital-return story is not repriced by Nvidia's data-center demand outlook or by American regulatory warnings. When the sympathy selloff hit Tuesday morning, buyers had a local anchor to lean on.

The currency quietly supports the same reading. The won closed at 1,386.07 per dollar, up just 0.08% — essentially flat, meaning the won weakened only marginally. A genuine foreign capital flight of the kind the morning equity move seemed to imply would normally be expected to show up in the exchange rate. It did not. The equity market panicked at the open; the currency market never did.

What this pattern usually implies

A V-shaped intraday reversal against heavy foreign selling admits two readings, and honesty requires holding both. The constructive reading is a domestic re-rating: local investors pricing a local catalyst — the shareholder return program — and treating an externally driven dip as a discount on it. Under that reading, the foreign selling is momentum-following flow tied to the US chip drawdown, and it exhausts itself. The skeptical reading is that this was dip-buying into an unresolved catalyst: a positioning-driven bounce the day before a binary event, which proves nothing until the event passes. Reversals that occur on the eve of a major earnings release are, by construction, ambiguous.

The test arrives almost immediately

Conveniently, this thesis does not have to wait long for adjudication. Three things will settle it:

  • Nvidia's second-quarter results, due August 26 US time. This is flagged as the week's biggest variable. The clean test: if the results disappoint and Korean chipmakers again hold up better than their US counterparts, Tuesday's decoupling was real. The source's own caution cuts the other way too — signals of slowing growth could shake Korean semiconductor stocks all over again, which would mean Tuesday was a rally borrowed against an event that then went wrong.
  • The final flow data. The 3.1304 trillion won foreign sell figure is an afternoon snapshot from before the last stretch of the rally. If confirmed closing data from KRX shows foreign selling materially smaller than that, foreigners participated in the reversal and the divergence is narrower than it looked. If the final figure is similar, domestic money did all the work — more impressive, but also more fragile, since it means the marginal foreign seller never turned.
  • Persistence of AI semiconductor leadership. A 2.14% theme-index gain ranking second of 39 on a day when the US analogues fell is remarkable once. If it repeats across subsequent sessions while the US names stay heavy, that is a trend; if it fades, Tuesday was a bounce.

The bottom line

Tuesday's session offered a rare controlled experiment: maximum negative input from the US semiconductor complex, and a Korean semiconductor complex that finished near the top of the theme leaderboard anyway, with domestic buyers eating multi-trillion-won foreign supply. The mechanism — a capital-return story that does not depend on the AI trade — is coherent, and the flat won suggests the morning fear was an equity-market reflex rather than a funding-market event. But a decoupling demonstrated for one afternoon, on the eve of Nvidia's results, is a hypothesis rather than a fact. By the end of this week, it will be one or the other.

This post takes one theme from the session in depth. For the index-by-index wrap of the same trading day, see Seoul Closing Bell.

Disclaimer: This post is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security. Figures are drawn from same-day exchange and press data and may be provisional. Do your own research before making investment decisions.

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