South Korea surges past Canada to become the seventh-largest stock market in the world

From the folks who brought you:

South Korea surges past Canada to become the seventh-largest stock market in the world

South Korea’s stock market has muscled its way into the world’s top seven, powered by an AI-chip rally that has propelled it past two major markets in just a matter of weeks.

According to Bloomberg data, the country’s listed companies now have a combined market capitalization of $4.59 trillion — edging past Canada’s $4.5 trillion to become the world’s seventh-largest equity market, about 10 days after overtaking the UK.

With a remarkable 71% surge in value this year, the country now only sits behind the US, China, Japan, Hong Kong, India, and Taiwan, which remains slightly ahead with a market value of around $4.66 trillion.

Seoul power

South Korea’s rapid rise has been led by Samsung Electronics, which crossed the $1 trillion valuation mark this week following its record first-quarter earnings, as well as reports that Apple is exploring Samsung as a potential US chipmaking partner.

SK Hynix, Korea’s second-largest company and the world’s leading high-bandwidth memory (HBM) supplier, also saw its shares rally more than 10% earlier this week after US tech giants, including Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, raised their AI data-center spending forecasts.

While Nvidia may have been the original face of the AI boom, much of the memory that powers its chips comes from South Korea. Samsung and SK Hynix together control roughly 80% of global HBM supply, producing much of the memory chips that Big Tech is racing to pack into new data centers.

That scramble has sent memory prices soaring, more than doubling the shares of both Samsung and SK Hynix this year alone, and helping propel the tech-heavy KOSPI above 7,000 for the first time. The two companies now account for nearly half of the benchmark’s total weighting.