Hardware stocks sold off on data centre slowdown fears. Korea's chip exports tell the other story: demand is still expanding.
When the forecast swings, buyers need GPUs that are ready now. That's the gap Aethir fills.
A lot of AI hardware stocks got sold yesterday on worries about a data centre slowdown. Korea's export numbers tell a very different story.
Korea shipped $56.4B of semiconductors in October, up 259% on a year ago. That's nearly half of everything the country exported last month.
Most of it is memory, at about $50B. Computer exports, driven by AI servers and server SSDs, were up 497% to $5.85B.
Prices and volumes both stayed high as big tech keeps spending to stay ahead in AI. Total exports hit $115.3B, and Korea now expects to pass $1 trillion for the year sometime this month.
This is the closest thing we have to a live read on AI hardware demand. It lands on the 1st of every month, weeks before anyone's earnings call.
Stocks can have a rough day for all sorts of reasons. The chips are still shipping at record pace, and I don't see a slowdown anywhere in these numbers