Samsung Electronics (005930) and SK hynix (000660) drew heavy buying in premarket trading after Nvidia, the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, reported strong earnings and issued a revenue outlook for next fiscal year that exceeded market expectations. Nvidia's chief financial officer also pointed to a memory supply shortage as a key bottleneck, a positive signal for the Korean stock market, which leans heavily on its two dominant memory makers.
Samsung Electronics rose more than 3% and SK hynix gained more than 4% in premarket trading on the 27th, according to Nextrade. Bid prices for large-cap chip stocks were revised upward ahead of the regular session open, adding momentum to the broader index.
Nvidia's second-quarter results, released after the close of the U.S. regular session overnight, lifted investor sentiment. The company said fiscal second-quarter revenue rose 106% from a year earlier to $96.22 billion, beating the market consensus of $92.17 billion by more than $4 billion and setting a record quarterly high for the 13th straight quarter. Revenue from the data center segment, which reflects AI chipset sales, jumped 117% year-on-year to $89 billion.
The revenue growth outlook for the next fiscal year, presented on the conference call, drove the market's enthusiasm. Nvidia guided to revenue growth of about 70%, far above Wall Street's forecast in the mid-40% range. That amounts to confidence in such high growth even after accounting for supply chain constraints.
Comments from Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress emphasizing memory supply constraints on the conference call also worked in favor of the Korean market. Kress said memory price increases had far exceeded expectations and were likely to rise further next year, adding that the memory shortage was a result of surging demand for AI infrastructure buildouts and that the bottleneck would persist at least through the end of fiscal 2028. Analysts said the remarks reaffirmed the strong pricing power and long-term demand visibility of Korean memory manufacturers in the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and server DRAM markets.
The New York regular session, which closed before Nvidia's earnings release, ended slightly lower across the board amid a wait-and-see mood. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 113.52 points, or 0.21%, to 53,463.88. The Standard & Poor's 500 slipped 1.58 points, or 0.02%, to 7,675.70, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropped 21.10 points, or 0.08%, to 26,130.20. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose 0.20%.
That caution appears to be reversing after Nvidia's earnings. Nvidia, which fell 1.59% in the regular session, surged more than 4% in after-hours trading following the results, while Micron rose more than 3%. The U.S. personal consumption expenditures price index for July rose 3.7% from a year earlier, slightly above the 3.6% forecast, but the core PCE price index came in at 3.3%, in line with expectations and easing inflation concerns. Market attention is turning to Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole speech on the 28th.
Analysts expect buying to gradually spread to stocks with improving third-quarter earnings after large-cap chip names lead the index higher. Han Ji-young, an analyst at Kiwoom Securities, said investor sentiment in the semiconductor sector had entered a genuine upturn as Nvidia's results confirmed memory demand visibility and pricing power. The analyst added that investors should leave open the possibility of a rotation into major sectors with high earnings-improvement visibility, such as energy and machinery, once the concentration of flows into semiconductors runs its course.
