{"id":91938,"date":"2026-07-20T06:36:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T06:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/91938\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T06:36:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T06:36:07","slug":"south-koreas-kospi-drops-nearly-5-as-some-ai-stocks-swoon-while-oil-keeps-climbing-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/91938\/","title":{"rendered":"South Korea’s Kospi drops nearly 5% as some AI stocks swoon, while oil keeps climbing"},"content":{"rendered":"

HONG KONG \u2013 Asian shares were mostly higher on Monday but South Korea\u2019s Kospi fell nearly 5% as investors unloaded more stocks linked to artificial intelligence.<\/a><\/p>\n

Japan\u2019s markets were closed Monday for a holiday and U.S. futures were mixed. <\/p>\n

Oil prices jumped more than 2%, with Brent crude above $90 a barrel as the U.S. and Iran moved closer to resuming an all-out war<\/a>. Early Monday, the U.S. announced more attacks for a ninth straight night. Iran has been responding to U.S. strikes by hitting U.S.-allies across the Middle East. <\/p>\n

Brent crude, the international standard, rose 2.6% to $90.40 per barrel and benchmark U.S. crude climbed 2.2% to $83.58 per barrel.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe U.S. and Iran continue to exchange strikes, which are proving to be deadly for both sides,\u201d ING commodities strategists Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey wrote in a commentary Monday. \u201cIf this escalation goes unchecked, we could return to an environment of wide-scale attacks across the Persian Gulf.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz<\/a>, a crucial waterway for global oil transport, have nearly ground to a halt, adding to pressures on supplies, they noted.<\/p>\n

In Asian share trading the Kospi, which has benefited substantially from the global AI frenzy<\/a>, sank 4.9% to 6,490.97. Two of its most valuable stocks booked losses. Samsung Electronics lost 4.4%, while memory chip maker SK Hynix fell 3.3%.<\/p>\n

Taiwan\u2019s Taiex, also heavy in AI-related stocks, edged less than 0.1% lower as its leading chipmaker, TSMC<\/a>, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., climbed 2%. It had fallen 7.3% on Friday after the company announced it plans to spend an additional $100 billion to expand its chipmaking capacity in the U.S.<\/p>\n

Hong Kong\u2019s Hang Seng rose 2.1% to 25,105.78, while the Shanghai Composite index gained 1.2% to 3,808.39.<\/p>\n

Australia\u2019s S&P\/ASX 200 edged 0.2% higher to 8,815.30.<\/p>\n

India’s Sensex slipped 0.9%.<\/p>\n

AI-related shares including chipmaking stocks declined on Friday, pulling world markets lower. Pledges of huge spending on AI are fueling worries<\/a> the sector may be in a bubble, and many investors have opted to sell to lock in profits from recent big gains. <\/p>\n

Markets were also shaken by the rollout of another powerful Chinese AI model<\/a>, this time by Beijing-based Moonshot AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The impact of the new Kimi K3<\/a> open-source AI model was similar to when China\u2019s \u201c DeepSeek<\/a> moment\u201d rattled world markets in early 2025. It was viewed as another sign of how lower-cost, capable Chinese AI models are increasingly challenging rivals like Anthropic\u2019s Claude and OpenAI\u2019s GPT.<\/p>\n

On Wall Street, the benchmark S&P 500 ended the week down 1% at 7,457.69. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.8% to 52,146.42, while the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite lost 1.4% to 25,520.24.<\/p>\n

Chipmaking stocks took a hit, with Nvidia falling 2.2%, while Broadcom and AMD, or Advanced Micro Devices, fell 1%.<\/p>\n

SpaceX<\/a>, Elon Musk\u2019s rocket company, dropped 5.4% after dropping below its initial public offering price of $135 a share, reaching its lowest point since its stock began public trading on the Nasdaq<\/a> last month.<\/p>\n

In other dealings, the U.S. dollar fell to 162.37 Japanese yen from 162.43 yen. The euro was trading at $1.1446, up from $1.1438.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HONG KONG \u2013 Asian shares were mostly higher on Monday but South Korea\u2019s Kospi fell nearly 5% as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[456],"tags":[845,846,78,2600,17741,48017,17742,76],"class_list":["post-91938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bank-of-korea","tag-bank-of-korea","tag-bok","tag-business","tag-elon-musk","tag-ewa-manthey","tag-kimi-k3","tag-warren-patterson","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}