Asian technology stocks fell sharply on Tuesday, October 13, 2026. According to a Yahoo Finance market report, South Korea's Kospi closed down 5.5% at 6,035.35 and Japan's Nikkei 225 fell 1.8% to 67,777.52, while memory maker Kioxia dropped more than 13%. The report ties the move to worries about the AI investment boom and to reports that China's memory maker CXMT had advanced a technology to raise chip density.
Asian market moves, October 13, 2026
Percent change at the close. Bar length shows the size of the fall.
Closed at 6,035.35
Closed at 67,777.52
Fell "more than 13%"; plotted at 13
Two separate threads converged on the same day: a comment from the chief executive of Broadcom about how AI is being financed, and a supply-side question about memory chips. This post separates them.
What Hock Tan said
Speaking at the DBS Asia Future Forward Conference in Singapore on October 12, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said many of those funding the AI boom "have no clue what they are investing in", and that some investors' expectations are so high that "it's almost like they are in a casino", as reported by Tradingpedia and Crypto Briefing. Coverage says he aimed the comment at money flowing into AI laboratories that still lose money building new models. He also said the biggest constraint may be capital, quoted as "[What] I think might be the biggest constraint is capital", and one report says he expects compute demand to stay robust at least until 2030.
The comments are worth reading as two claims, not one. The first is about investor understanding; the second is that financing, rather than chips or power, may be the next bottleneck. They are compatible with strong demand for Broadcom's own products, and Tan did not forecast weak demand according to the coverage above.
The CXMT memory question
Per the Yahoo Finance report, analyst David Morrison said reports of CXMT progress suggest supplies of key memory chips may not be as tight as investors thought. Memory makers' profits depend on tight supply, so news that a new competitor could raise output or density bears directly on Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Kioxia. In the TechStartups roundup of the day, Samsung fell 7.4% and SK Hynix 10% at one point in the session (TechStartups), while other outlets give different intraday and closing figures for SK Hynix, so we treat those stock-level numbers as approximate.
CXMT was already a market theme. A separate Metir analysis of the CXMT IPO covered the listing, and the October reports extend the same competition concern.
Why a single index moves so much
The Kospi is unusually concentrated. Reporting by Yonhap-sourced coverage on an earlier chip selloff notes that Samsung and SK Hynix together account for more than half of the index's weight, so a fall in both moves the whole benchmark. A rough check: if two stocks that make up about half the index each fell around 8% to 10%, they would alone subtract 4 to 5 percentage points from the index, which is consistent with a 5.5% overall decline. That is an illustrative estimate, not a reported attribution.
A market where two stocks are half the index turns a sector story into a national index story.
Reading of the Kospi's concentration
Context from the IMF
The same day, the IMF's October 2026 Global Financial Stability Report named an AI-driven correction as one of three salient near-term risks; our separate analysis of that report covers the figures. Correlation is not causation here: the report and Tan's remarks arrived within hours of each other, and no source we found attributes the selloff to either.
What to watch
- Confirmation on CXMT. Reports of technical progress are not volume production. Watch for yields, capacity and pricing data.
- US session. US stocks ended mostly lower ahead of Wednesday's consumer price index report, per Yahoo Finance, so inflation data may matter as much as AI news.
- Capital markets access. If financing is the constraint Tan describes, funding rounds and debt issuance will show it first.
- Source variance. Outlets differ on SK Hynix and Samsung moves. Use exchange data for exact figures.
For teams relying on AI services, price and capacity can swing with these cycles, which is one reason model-agnostic tools such as Metir keep workloads portable across providers.
Sources:
- Seoul, Tokyo stocks plunge as Asia tech sell-off hits - Yahoo Finance
- Broadcom chief flags casino-like speculation in AI stocks - Tradingpedia
- Broadcom CEO Hock Tan says many AI investors act like gamblers - Crypto Briefing
- South Korean Stock Market Plunges Nearly 11% as Chip Stocks Tumble - Tiger Brokers (earlier selloff, index weighting)
- Top Tech News Today, October 13, 2026 - TechStartups
Image credits
Header and in-body image: Korea Exchange building in Busan, by hyolee2, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (source).