Asia's Chip Markets — Kospi and Taiwan fall 3.6%, Bitcoin slips under 77,000, Nasdaq futures dip
Asia sold chip stocks again this morning. Korea's Kospi fell 3.59% to 5,648.79 and Taiwan's index 3.59% to 43,307.54, with SK Hynix down 5.0%, Samsung Electronics 4.1% and MediaTek 7.4%. India's Nifty 50 went the other way, up 0.99%, Hong Kong edged up 0.19% and Japan was closed for a holiday. Australia's central bank raised rates by a quarter point to 4.85%, its highest since 2008.
In one month the AI trade split three ways. The Rubin 100, our index of the companies that build AI hardware, fell 22.2% and on Monday closed at 1,686.83, below the 1,703.80 line we set on 28 October, so the tradable-bottom case is off. The Agentic Ecosystem, the companies that run and secure AI workloads, lost 12.0% in a week and 15.8% in a month, led down by the compute operators IREN, CoreWeave and Nebius. AI Users, the companies that put AI to work in their own business, rose 7.9% in the month and sits 0.7% under its high, with Accenture, Eli Lilly and Walmart leading. Since 22 June the gap between the builders and the users is 48 percentage points. Tonight AMD reports.