Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix each closed more than 9 percent lower on Thursday, dragging South Korea's Kospi into a technology-led rout that spread from Wednesday's Nasdaq selloff and rippled across Hong Kong and Shanghai chipmakers.

Samsung fell 9.06 percent to 286,000 won and SK Hynix dropped 14.57 percent to 2,187,000 won, CNBC reported. Hong Kong-listed Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation fell more than 11 percent and Hua Hong Grace tumbled 14 percent. The declines followed a Wall Street session in which Micron Technology shares dived more than 10 percent, alongside Sandisk, Nvidia and Broadcom.

The synchronized selloff arrives two days after the S&P 500 and Nasdaq capped their strongest quarter since 2020 and Michael Burry disclosed on Substack that he had shorted Caterpillar for the first time. Burry, who profited from the 2008 subprime crash, also placed new bearish wagers on Nvidia, Applied Materials, Tesla and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.

The Burry trade

Burry shorted Caterpillar at $1,060.98 after the construction-equipment maker nearly doubled in the first half of 2026 as investors treated it as a proxy for AI infrastructure buildouts. Caterpillar closed the half up 86 percent.

"Caterpillar jumped out at me," Burry wrote on Substack. "I have never shorted Caterpillar. It has always done great for me on the long side in the past."

He also flagged the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index trading about 65 percent above its 200-day moving average, a level he said had been reached only during the 2000 dot-com bubble.

Korea on the tape

Zavier Wong, a market analyst at eToro, said in a note that Samsung and SK Hynix "now make up around half the Kospi's total weight, up from around just a quarter at the end of last year." He added that "a sharp move in either name drags the whole index with it before the other roughly nine hundred listed companies get a say."

Hours before shares crashed, SK Hynix Chief Executive Kwak Noh-jung unveiled a 100 trillion won ($64.37 billion) domestic investment plan anchored by the M17 fabrication plant, targeted for operations in the first half of 2029. "These investments are aimed at meeting the soaring demand for HBM servers and DRAM, as well as enterprise SSDs and NAND, as AI services take off," Kwak said in Asan.

The plan builds on the South Korean government's June 29 unveiling of an 800 trillion won semiconductor and AI program. Burry named that program in his post. "The proximate cause of today's rally is big spending announced out of Korea. Well, I see that as the beginning of the end," he wrote. "It is only a matter of time now."

The other side

Bulls who read Thursday's session as a healthy correction were not represented in the day's coverage, which drew only on CNBC. Last week's rebound, when Micron's 84.9 percent gross margin and Qualcomm's doubled 2029 non-handset target erased an earlier chip rout, made the opposite case: that revenue was catching up to the multiple.

SK Hynix is set to begin trading American depositary receipts on the Nasdaq on July 10, giving U.S. investors a direct read on whether the Korean rout was a one-session shock or the start of a broader repricing.