Asia’s semiconductor and related stocks rose on Wednesday after chipmaker Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company thanks to the AI boom. Nvidia rose 3.6% on Tuesday, giving the company a market capitalization of $3.34 trillion, surpassing Microsoft, which currently has a market capitalization of $3.32 trillion. Earlier this month, Nvidia hit the $3 trillion mark for the first time, overtaking Apple.
Nvidia shares have risen nearly 174% since the start of the year. Taiwan: TSMC and Foxconn Contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Positive investor sentiment toward Nvidia spread to Asian technology stocks, with shares rising as much as 4.34%. TSMC makes Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processors that power large language models (machine learning programs that can recognize and generate text).
Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd. – known internationally as Foxconn – rose as much as 4.78%. The company has a strategic partnership with Nvidia to build “AI factories” where Nvidia’s chips will be used in a variety of applications, including electric vehicles and LLM. Japan: Advantest and SoftBank Group Corp. Japanese tech stocks also rose, including semiconductor testing equipment supplier Advantest, which counts Nvidia as a customer, according to Bloomberg data. Bloomberg reported that Advantest’s shares rose as much as 3.86% on Wednesday, even though NVIDIA accounts for less than 1% of Advantest’s total revenue.
Shares of SoftBank Group Corp., a Japanese investor with a stake in chip design company Arm, whose architecture is used in Nvidia chips, rose as much as 4.19%. South Korea: Samsung and SK Hynix Nvidia’s value chain also extends to South Korea, namely memory chip maker SK Hynix and conglomerate Samsung Electronics. Samsung shares rose as much as 3.38% and SK Hynix rose as much as 7.04%. SK Hynix supplies Nvidia with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in AI chipsets. Until March, the company was the only known supplier of HBM chips to Nvidia, according to Reuters. In June, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Hwang told reporters that the company was testing HBM chips from Samsung and Micron Electronics. Samsung previously denied an exclusive Reuters report that its chips had failed Nvidia’s tests because of heat and power-drain issues. Asked about the report, Hwang reportedly said, “There’s no story there.”
