AI Boom Fuels Asian Chip Companies

At Taiwan’s biggest computer show this month, Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, was mobbed like a rock star, dragged from booth to booth by the crowd as he signed autographs and posed for selfies.

At the booth of SK Hynix, one of its most important South Korean suppliers, Mr. Huang picked up a marker and left a message. On a reflective wafer of memory – a now scarce commodity part of Nvidia’s AI supercomputers – he wrote: “Please make more :).

It was only half a joke. As tech giants pour hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers around the world, demand for chips, wiring and power systems that use artificial intelligence is outstripping supply.

This spending spree has made Nvidia the world’s most valuable publicly traded company. Now the bonanza is lifting a host of lesser-known semiconductor companies—among them many Asian firms few Americans have heard of—that make up essential, unsung parts of the data centers being built around the world.

“It was a boring industry that no one cared about, but now it’s become the most critical infrastructure for the world,” said Timothy Arcuri, UBS semiconductor analyst. “They’re basically laying down the tracks and all that commerce will be on them for years.”

The gold rush redraws the map of technological power. Chips are the brains of AI systems that process vast amounts of information. They also need memory technology that stores the information the systems are thinking about. In recent years, AI models have grown so much that storing information has become as valuable as processing it.

The most advanced recall comes, overwhelmingly, from South Korea and Taiwan, and soaring prices caused by supply constraints are piling new wealth into the two Asian democracies.

Just ten years ago, memory was a cheap commodity whose prices were in brutal cycles at the whim of the larger technology companies. Prices have more than doubled this year. Only three companies made it to the top level: South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung, and the American company Micron, whose most advanced factories are in Taiwan.

None of them are Chinese. Despite years of spending, Beijing has been locked out of much of the supply chain for advanced AI servers. It’s a fortuitous triumph for Washington: the subsidies meant to pull manufacturing out of China almost overnight did less than the boom did.

Success comes with a catch. Much of the technology is designed in the United States, but the supply chain still runs through Taiwan and South Korea, neighbors of China and North Korea, where U.S. officials have long feared tensions could flare.

South Korea’s stock market has roughly doubled in 2026, the best performance of any major market. Taiwan has set its own records. Samsung and SK Hynix made South Korea the first country outside the United States to have more than one company hit $1 trillion in market value at once. Micron also entered the trillion dollar club.

Evidence of this boom was everywhere at Computex, the Taipei trade show that is an industry fixture devoted to deeply technical goods: data center installations, voltage converters and memory products with names like HBM4E and SOCAMM2.

This year there was even a bit of glare in the air. Strikingly international crowds gathered around exposed cooling pipes and lingered over bare silicon wafers in glass cases. At Nvidia’s booth, a lone server rack spun on a pedestal. Onlookers stopped to take selfies with the box.

At the SK Hynix booth where Mr. Huang signed the wafer, engineer Vincent Wang said he never saw the rally coming. A veteran of the leaner years — when the memory market crash destroyed Taiwan’s chip industry and almost forced a government bailout — he didn’t even own stock in his own company.

To Mr. Huang’s plea to earn more, Mr. Wang had a counteroffer: “Please pay more.”

In South Korea, where chip workers at Samsung and SK Hynix collect profit-linked bonuses, reports of lavish employee spending have filled local news. Chip workers have started a shopping spree in exotic cars. Speculators are chasing flats along commuter routes that serve the two chip makers. One matchmaking service has increased its “spouse index” for Samsung employees, placing them in the top tier of lawyers and doctors.

Good times are also rolling at Micron, which has been buying up chunks of Taiwan’s memory industry for years. In his hometown of Boise, Idaho, he is building a 43,200-square-foot hangar for his corporate jets with office space, a kitchen and a bay designated as “executive parking.” It is part of a multibillion-dollar expansion in the state that is among the largest private investments in Idaho history.

Samsung did not respond to emailed inquiries. Micron declined to comment. SK Hynix said it is accelerating the construction of its chip factories and ramping up production to meet demand.

Mr. Huang has become a king in the industry. Last year, Nvidia invested $5 billion in Intel, the struggling Silicon Valley chipmaker, and pledged to develop chips with it. Intel shares have nearly quadrupled since then.

“Everybody has a smile on their face now,” said Frank Seifert, chief executive of Taiwanese memory company Adata. He watched Mr. Huang’s keynote at Computex like thousands of industry fans. When Mr. Huang praised a partner, chip design company Marvell, saying it would be the next trillion-dollar company, Mr. Seifert bought the stock. It rose more than 25 percent that day.

Opportunities are rising for a new generation of start-ups in Asia and the United States. A decade ago, venture capitalists didn’t want to touch chip companies, said Aaron Jacobson, a partner at venture capital firm NEA. They required huge investments to prove their technology worked, and their customers were tech giants who demanded low prices. Now the market is bigger and customers are everywhere.

“When you look at what’s happening in the AI ​​data center, there are so many obstacles and things that need to be reinvented,” Mr. Jacobson said.

This moment is the inversion of the last big hardware boom. Twenty years ago, the smartphone turned China into the world’s factory. The United States bet that trade would bring the two countries together and keep the peace, and was content to let that happen. This planted a manufacturing base that helped make China a rival.

China is conspicuously absent this time. US tariffs and technology restrictions have largely frozen Beijing’s AI frenzy.

South Korean and Taiwanese companies that once helped build the industry in China — through joint ventures, mainland chip factories and engineers lured away — are now reaping the boom themselves. And the windfall extends beyond the chips, into the racks, power systems and cooling that surround them.

Foxconn and Quanta, which became huge by assembling smartphones and laptops, are now building AI servers in Mexico, Southeast Asia and Taiwan. Once boring companies like Delta Electronics, which made money in power supplies and cooling fans, are growing rapidly in the power converters and liquid cooling that AI data centers require.

In Taiwan, where past boom-and-bust cycles have bankrupted companies and rocked the economy, many remain wary. They were reminded of the risks last week when chip stocks tumbled on fears that the AI ​​rally may fall short of Wall Street’s lofty expectations.

But that didn’t stop the engineers from piling on. Smartphones glowing with stock charts have become an increasingly common sight in Taipei – in gyms, doctor’s offices and cubicles.

The wafer signed by Mr. Huang is likely to end up framed on a wall at SK Hynix’s headquarters in South Korea, Mr. Wang said.

Whether it’s read over time as a souvenir of a historic boom or a relic of a bubble, it already means something bigger: the arrival of an almost China-free supply chain for the world’s most advanced AI, built in two of the most contested places on the map.

Joe Rennison contributed reporting from New York.