Major semiconductor company shares dropped sharply across Asian and US trading floors on July 28, 2026, as a massive sell-off targeting artificial intelligence-related equities intensified.
South Korea's benchmark Kospi index triggered an automatic circuit breaker early Tuesday morning after falling 8%.
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Trading was temporarily halted for 20 minutes before resuming to drop roughly 10% lower.
Technology heavyweights Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix saw their stock values sink by more than 10% during the market slide.
The Asian market retreat followed a 5% drop for AI chip manufacturer Nvidia in New York trading on Monday.
That decline allowed Apple to surpass Nvidia as the world's most valuable publicly traded company.
The slide came amid reports from the Wall Street Journal that Nvidia is negotiating a $250 billion financing agreement with OpenAI for a large-scale data center initiative.
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The Kospi has now activated its circuit breaker mechanism eight times this year to curtail panic selling among a growing retail investor base.
Despite more than doubling earlier in the year to reach a peak in mid-June, the index has subsequently surrendered about one-third of its total value.
In international trading on Monday, US-listed shares of SK Hynix fell 7.5%, falling well beneath its $149 offer price set during its Nasdaq listing on July 9.
Japan's tech-heavy Nikkei 225 index similarly dropped nearly 4.5% during Tuesday morning trading sessions.
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Industry analysts have raised questions over whether heavy investments in artificial intelligence capabilities will yield sufficient profitability for governments and corporations seeking to recoup hundreds of billions in capital outlay.
