SK Hynix, SoftBank shares plunge as tech stocks in Asia track Wall Street chip sell-off

BREAKING: SK Hynix and SoftBank shares plunge over 8% as a Wall Street semiconductor sell-off spills into Asian markets, dragging tech stocks lower across the region amid AI financing worries.

SK Hynix just dropped more than 8 percent in a single session.

Samsung fell 7.9, both at their lowest levels since August. And over in Tokyo, SoftBank sank 8 percent too, dragging Japanese chip names down with it. Tokyo Electron off 6.6, Advantest down more than 5. One bad Monday on Wall Street, and the whole Asian tech complex caught the flu.

The trigger is interesting. China's ChangXin Memory announced progress on a new chip architecture over the weekend, and suddenly everyone's asking if the Korean memory giants have real competition coming. The analysts I'd trust say not yet, CXMT still can't mass produce and it's nowhere in high bandwidth memory. But nobody waited to hear that before selling.

That's the real story here. These stocks have run so hard on AI that a Chinese press release can erase tens of billions in market value overnight. That's not competition. That's nerves.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.