Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) has become one of the hottest large-cap AI trades in the world, climbing roughly 275% over the past year, even after Friday’s chip-led rout.
Behind Samsung’s surge is one of the stranger echoes from an earlier market mania.
DI Corp (003160.KS), the Korean semiconductor equipment maker once swept up in the frenzy around Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” is back on the AI map through its Digital Frontier subsidiary. But the chart shows how much the Korean memory trade has moved beyond the novelty of a viral-stock callback.
DI has gained about 40% over the past year, a strong move in most markets. Samsung has done several times that, with the gap widening since early May as the AI memory trade became less about niche suppliers and more about the biggest names tied to the next wave of high-bandwidth memory.
DI still belongs in the story.
Its stock has lagged the latest chip-led rally, but its Digital Frontier unit has been supplying HBM4 wafer testers to SK Hynix (000660.KS). Those machines check whether advanced memory wafers work before they are cut into individual chips, a small but important step in a supply chain where HBM is scarce, expensive, and central to AI accelerators.
That makes DI part of the plumbing. Samsung shows what happened when investors started paying up for the broader Korean memory complex.
The same trade has also spilled into the US ETF market.
The iShares MSCI South Korea ETF (EWY) is not a pure semiconductor fund, but it has become one of the simplest US-listed ways to reach Korea’s AI-memory complex, including Samsung and SK Hynix. iShares data shows the fund has roughly $21 billion in assets, 78 holdings, and more than half its portfolio in technology.
That exposure no longer trades like a quiet country allocation.
EWY dropped 14% Friday, while the PHLX Semiconductor Index (^SOX) fell 10%. According to Yahoo Finance analysis, it was the worst day for both since the March 2020 pandemic lows. By Monday’s close, both had bounced more than 5%.
The “Gangnam Style” link is a reminder that market manias often start with the easiest story to tell.
This one has moved deeper into the supply chain. Korea is now one of the clearest public routes into the AI-memory boom, and the ETF moves with chip-stock speed on the way down.
Jared Blikre is the global markets and data editor for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @SPYJared or email him at [email protected].
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