Asian chip names rally as Nvidia forecasts hotter-than-expected sales after earnings beat

Asian chip stocks rallied in early trading Thursday after American AI chip darling Nvidia posted strong third quarter earnings, in a sign that AI bubble concerns aren’t slowing down the AI industry.

South Korea’s SK Hynix pared gains to rise nearly 2%. The memory chip maker is Nvidia’s top supplier of high-bandwidth memory used in AI applications. 

Samsung Electronics, which also supplies Nvidia with memory, was up more than 5%. The company has been working to catch up to SK Hynix in high-bandwidth memory to land more contracts with Nvidia. 

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, which produces most of Nvidia’s chip designs, rose over 4% in Taipei. Hon Hai Precision Industry — also known as Foxconn, and manufacturer of server racks designed for AI workloads — climbed 3.28%.

The Asian chip giants’ rally comes after Nvidia’s earnings topped Wall Street expectations on Wednesday, with the company providing a stronger-than-expected sales guidance for the fourth quarter.

Nvidia’s sales and outlook are closely watched by the technology industry as a sign of the health of the AI boom, and its earnings come against the backdrop of recent market fears regarding an AI bubble.

However, the company’s strong results and forecasts should ease immediate AI bubble concerns, Rolf Bulk, equity research analyst at New Street Research, told CNBC.

“Demand is diversified, with AI-native companies deploying agentic AI solutions, and enterprises increasingly integrating AI across their existing products and services,” Bulk said.

“We expect Nvidia’s results to drive higher earnings estimates across the sector, including for its primary GPU supplier TSMC, memory vendors SK Hynix and Samsung, and the broader Asian subcomponent and assembly value chain,” he added.

In Tokyo, Renesas Electronics, a key Nvidia supplier, pared gains to rise 1.51%. Tokyo Electron, which provides essential chipmaking equipment to foundries that manufacture Nvidia’s chips, gained 5.67%. Another Japanese chip equipment maker, Lasertec, was up more than 6%. 

Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank skyrocketed nearly 7% at the open and was last trading 2.66%, though the firm recently offloaded its shares of Nvidia. Softbank owns the majority of British semiconductor company Arm, which supplies Nvidia with chip architecture and designs.

SoftBank is also involved in a number of AI ventures that use Nvidia’s technology, including the $500 billion Stargate project for data centers in the U.S.

“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told investors on an earnings call. “From our vantage point, we see something very different.”

— CNBC’s Nur Hikmah Md Ali contributed to this story.