Early last night, just around the time Korean stocks opened at a new all time high, we highlighted an article in Korea's Chosun Biz, which eventually became the catalyst for the sharp repricing lower of memory stocks - and since memory stocks account for about 60% of the Kospi, sparked the 10% crash in the South Korean market which culminated with a mandatory halt of trading - and sparked a risk off wave around the globe. 

As both CNBC and Bloomberg write this morning, "traders are pointing to a South Korean media report saying SK Hynix is slowing expansion of AI memory chip production and shifting emphasis to commodity DRAM."

What exactly is the article saying? The punchline was the following:

The slowdown in HBM4 (or high bandwidth memory) rollout which is critical for high end AI racks, was - naturally - spun as a positive event and was justified as SK Hynix moving back to DDR memory production, which somehow is now higher margin, but the bottom line is simple: supply for high end HBM is slowing which in turn has prompted questions whether this is due to a cartel-like attempt to control pricing (probably not very smart to admit this), or more likely, in response to problems with the rollout of high end Nvidia systems, and especially the Vera Rubin racks which as we reported a month ago are emerging as extremely expensive, primarily because of the surge in memory prices which are crushing hyperscaler margins.

Here is the full Chosun article: