South Korea Is Crushing The Nasdaq 100 By Most Margin Since 2001

If you thought the AI trade was a U.S.-only story, the numbers say think again. South Korean equities are outpacing U.S. tech by the widest margin in 25 years.

The iShares South Korea ETF (NYSE:EWY) has outperformed the Nasdaq 100 by 85 percentage points thus far this year, a divergence not seen since the year markets were clawing out of the dot-com wreckage.

The fund investing in South Korean equities has returned 104.04% year-to-date through May 27, according to Benzinga ETF data. The Invesco QQQ Trust Series 1 (NASDAQ:QQQ) – the proxy for the Nasdaq 100 – is up 18.75% over the same window.

Data from CountryETFTracker.com also shows that South Korea is the top-performing country-linked ETF market of 2026, with the iShares MSCI South Korea ETF vastly outperforming the iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF, which ranks second with a 62% year-to-date gain.

What Is Driving The Gap Between South Korea And US Tech?

The answer is concentrated in two stocks.

SK Hynix Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. together make up 52.94% of the EWY portfolio.

Both crossed the $1 trillion market capitalization threshold this month, making South Korea the first country outside the United States to host more than one publicly traded company with a market capitalization exceeding $1 trillion simultaneously.

SK Hynix shares are up 245.24% year-to-date in won terms. Samsung Electronics is up 156.57%.

Together they have contributed 7,264 basis points to EWY’s 10,405-basis-point return.

The driver is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM – the specialized chips that sit next to Nvidia Corp.’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) accelerators inside every AI server being built.

SK Hynix has sold out its entire 2026 HBM production allocation. Samsung is racing to expand capacity by roughly 50% this year.

The QQQ has also seen some standout stories.

Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:MU) is up 224.02% year-to-date, Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) is up 227.35%, and Sandisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) is up 570.57%.

Yet, they are combined weight pale in comparison to the Magnificent Seven, which have lagged the memory trade.

Nvidia is up 14.25% with an 8.39% weight. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is up 14.14%. Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) is down on the year.

That ballast is why QQQ trails EWY by 85 percentage points.

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