A semiconductor wafer is on display at Touch Taiwan, an annual display exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan, on April 16, 2025.
Ann Wang | Reuters
Chip stocks in Asia rose Thursday, after artificial intelligence darling Nvidia’s shares hit a record close to reclaim the title of the world’s most valuable company.
Shares of South Korea’s SK Hynix, which supplies memory chips to Nvidia, gained 3.53%. TSMC, which manufactures Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units that help power large language models, saw a smaller rise of 0.47%.
Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry — also known as Foxconn — was 0.77% higher. It has a strategic partnership with Nvidia to build “AI factories,” that incorporate Nvidia’s chips in a whole range of applications, including electric vehicles and LLMs.
Several Japanese chip stocks also rose as Nvidia’s rise sparked wider optimism around the artificial intelligence sector.
Semiconductor testing equipment supplier Advantest gained 3.93% to hit a record high. Japanese technology conglomerate Softbank, which owns a stake in British chip designer Arm, saw shares jump 4.38%.
Tokyo Electron and Lasertec climbed 2.13% and 1.57%, respectively. Renesas Electron added 2.22%.
“The recovery in Asian chip stocks reflects confidence in continued expansion of AI demand,” said Kingsley Jones, founding partner and CIO for advisory boutique Jevons Global.
“The tariff fears appear to have abated and so Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese names are back on the menu,” he told CNBC, adding that Nvidia was driving the sentiment in the sector.
Nvidia shares climbed over 4% on Wednesday stateside, closing at a new all-time high for the first time since January.
The stock ended the session at $154.31, topping its previous record close of $149.43 from Jan. 6. With a market value of $3.77 trillion, Nvidia is now the most valuable company in the world, edging past Microsoft.
The rally reflects growing investor confidence in the chipmaker’s dominance in artificial intelligence, in spite of export restrictions to China.
In April, the Trump administration implemented new regulations that blocked sales of Nvidia’s H20 AI chip, which had been designed to comply with earlier restrictions. Nvidia said last month the move would result in an $8 billion hit to its sales, as well as a $4.5 billion inventory write-down.
—CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this report.