Kospi plunges ~9% at Friday open, triggering trading halt, as Thursday's U.S. AI selloff spreads to Asia (Nov 5-6)
What happened
South Korea's Kospi plunged by almost 9% at the market open on Friday, triggering a 20-minute trading halt on the exchange. The rout is the overnight follow-through from Thursday's Wall Street selloff, when the Nasdaq slumped 5.52% into correction territory, the S&P 500 fell 4.36% and the Dow dropped 1,833 points (3.44%) — wiping out roughly $2.5 trillion in market value in a single session. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 12.3%, its worst day in roughly six-and-a-half years, and the VIX surged about 70%, its biggest one-day jump in almost two years.
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Who’s affected
- Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix (Kospi heavyweights, memory-chip exposure) — direct hit from the global chip selloff
- Nvidia (NVDA, -9.3% Thursday, erasing its 2026 gains), AMD (-17%), Micron, SanDisk and Broadcom — AI hardware supply chain
- Tesla (TSLA, -11% Thursday) and SpaceX — political scrutiny after Musk-backed Republican candidates lost
- Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft — hyperscalers whose data-center buildouts face new permitting risk
- CoreWeave (-10%) and Nebius (-15%) — neoclouds; the broader Nasdaq and S&P 500, both posting their worst day since April 2025.