Suspense Crime, Digital Desk : The opening bell on Monday morning was calm enough, the investors were confident the market uptrend of the last several months was bound to continue. Wouldn't you be confident too? After all while the stock markets all around the world tanked in 2026, the one that boomed had been experiencing a stellar rally. We are talking about one of the fastest growing markets with up to 100% returns in six months.But within a matter of minutes the mood shifted dramatically.. So much so, that the investors were left reeling from the shock of red screens, falling Samsung shares and an accelerating slump at SK Hynix with foreign investors aggressively exiting their positions. Suddenly, it seemed the whole market would go crashing down like it was teetering on the edge of a cliff.By the time the market closed in a matter of hours, South Korea's main stock index, the KOSPI, had tumbled 676.18 points (or 8.29 percent) to end the day at 7,484.41, its biggest single-day decline since March 4. But that's not it, investors lost $270 billion (roughly 22.5 lakh crore) in a single trading session-an amount that could easily fund the annual budgets of multiple countries. So what triggered the sudden collapse? That all begins with the Artificial Intelligence or AI boom that's been all over the world for the last year and a half to two years. The markets were hungry for everything and anything AI related and there was no place which showed that better than South Korea. The biggest beneficiary of the AI boom has undoubtedly been the two largest tech companies of South Korea – Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix – because the two companies produce memory chips and semiconductors, which are essential components in the high-powered computers and data centers needed to run the Artificial Intelligence technology. With this investment came a spectacular 80% rise in the KOSPI index this year. However, as the saying goes, what goes up really quickly, sometimes falls equally fast too, and on Monday we witnessed a realization of that saying. An immediate fear of an AI bubble surfaced and US tech stocks have been under tremendous pressure for the last couple of days.
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