Asia's Chip Rout: What Happened in Asian Markets This Week
China's CSI 300 entered a bear market. Korea's Kospi is heading for a fourth straight weekly loss. Taiwan's exchange shut for a typhoon. Underneath nearly all of it is one question that started in America: whether the money being spent on AI will ever earn a return.
A dated snapshot of a single week. Figures are intraday on Friday 23 October 2026 and will be stale quickly. Where two sources reported different numbers for the same index, we show both rather than picking one — see the note on that below. Nothing here is a recommendation.
How the week ended
Asian markets fell on Friday, following a heavy selloff in US technology shares the day before.
| Market | Friday move | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Kospi (South Korea) | −2.2% to −3.6% | heading for a fourth straight weekly loss |
| KOSDAQ (South Korea) | −3.5% | smaller-company index |
| Nikkei 225 (Japan) | −0.6% to −1.4% | defensives rose against the trend |
| Topix (Japan) | −0.8% | |
| Shanghai Composite (China) | −1.3% | |
| Hang Seng (Hong Kong) | +0.25% | the only major gainer |
| ASX 200 (Australia) | −0.4% | |
| Taiwan | closed | exchange shut due to a typhoon |
| MSCI Asia Pacific | −0.3% | near levels last seen in July |
About those ranges. Two reputable sources published different figures for the Kospi and the Nikkei on the same day — roughly −2.2% and −3.6% for Korea. Neither is wrong; they were measured at different points in a volatile session. We have shown the range instead of quietly choosing the more dramatic number. When you see a single precise figure for an index "today", it is worth asking when today it was taken.
The biggest number of the week
The headline move was not Friday's. On Thursday, China's CSI 300 entered a bear market — conventionally defined as a fall of 20% or more from a recent peak. Since its May high, the index has lost about $2.4 trillion in value.
For scale, that single decline is larger than the entire annual economic output of most countries. It happened while Western coverage was focused on US technology earnings.
Where it came from
Thursday in the United States did the damage:
- The Philadelphia semiconductor index fell 6.7% — its biggest single-day decline since June.
- The Nasdaq fell more than 2.5% after big technology earnings, with Meta's spending plans singled out as reigniting "renewed concerns about returns on AI investment."
Asia is where AI hardware is physically made. Korea makes the memory, Taiwan makes the logic chips, Japan makes much of the equipment that makes both. So a US argument about whether AI spending will pay off lands directly on Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo the following morning. On Friday, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix each fell more than 2%, with SK Hynix down as much as 4.2% early in Seoul.
This is the continuation of the memory selloff we wrote about last week in SanDisk vs. Intel vs. Micron. What began as a specific worry about Chinese memory competition has broadened into a general question about AI returns.
Three details worth more than the index moves
An IPO got pulled
Solidigm ended its review of a US listing, citing market conditions and share price trends. That is how a closing IPO window looks from the inside: companies quietly stop trying. It is a useful leading indicator, and it contrasts with African listings, where Dangote's offer is still drawing demand.
Credit started to notice
Asian investment-grade dollar bond spreads widened to their highest since July 2025. Equity selloffs are common and often meaningless. When the bond market starts charging more to lend to the same companies, more people pay attention, because credit markets tend to be less forgiving than equity markets.
The safe havens didn't behave
In a textbook risk-off week, gold rises. Instead gold fell 2.8% on Thursday to around $4,017 an ounce, and silver closed at its lowest in almost a year. Meanwhile Brent crude jumped about 4% to near $113 and WTI closed above $99.
The yen did behave as expected, firming to about 156.25 per dollar as money moved to safety.
The lesson is that "risk-off" is a story we tell afterwards, not a rule the market follows. Assets that are supposed to move together frequently don't.
The year still looks very different from the week
One bad week is not a trend, and the year-to-date numbers for Asian markets remain strong.
| Fund (US-listed) | Market | 2026 so far | 1 year |
|---|---|---|---|
| EWY | South Korea | +55.9% | +73.2% |
| EWJ | Japan | +17.0% | +19.3% |
| INDA | India | −14.1% | −16.0% |
| SPY | United States | +12.4% | +15.1% |
Korea is up roughly 56% in 2026 even after four consecutive losing weeks. India is down 14% in a year that has been good almost everywhere else. "Asian markets" is not one thing, and treating the region as a single trade hides more than it reveals.
What a beginner should take from a week like this
Supply chains transmit sentiment. You do not need to own a US chip stock to be exposed to US chip sentiment. If you hold a Korea or Taiwan fund, you own that argument too.
A bear market is a definition, not a verdict. The CSI 300 crossing −20% from its peak is a descriptive label. It tells you what has happened, not what happens next.
Check the timestamp. The same index was down 2.2% and 3.6% on the same day depending on when you looked.
Zoom out before concluding anything. The market that fell hardest this week is still up about 56% this year.
We are not going to tell you whether this is the start of something or noise — we do not know, and our editorial policy keeps us out of that business. Ask again in six months, which is roughly how long it takes to find out.
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Start paper trading →Sources
- Saxo, "Asia Market Quick Take — October 23, 2026" — index moves, CSI 300 bear market and $2.4tn figure, credit spreads, currencies, gold, silver and oil — home.saxo
- InvestingLive, "Asian stocks slide as chip rout spreads," 23 Oct. 2026 — index moves, Philadelphia semiconductor index, Nasdaq, SK Hynix and Solidigm — investinglive.com
- BNN Bloomberg / Associated Press, "Stock market today: AI losses, oil price jump leave shares mixed," 23 Oct. 2026 — bnnbloomberg.ca
- StockAnalysis, country fund comparison (EWY, EWJ, INDA, SPY) — year-to-date and one-year returns, 23 Oct. 2026 — stockanalysis.com