Market Open: ASX to open-0.3% as Wall Street spooked by Chinese microchip breakthrough; KOSPI plummet

As I mentioned in yesterday’s ASX Today market wrap, the plummet we saw on Korea’s stock market intraday Tuesday did in fact rattle Wall Street overnight with both the NASDAQ and S&P500 closing red.

While Mag7 tech companies showed resilience, it was in the non-Mag7 AI tech scene that we saw problems on Wall Street overnight; Micron and Applied Materials both ended up red.

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Even on Taiwan’s stock market yesterday, TSMC – the ‘godhead’ stock of the entire AI trade, given it still has the most advanced microchip facilities in the world – also closed red.

So what spooked markets? China’s own microchip development company ex-Taiwan, CXMT, announced it has designed its own in-house fifth-generation server memory chip that brings it closer to competing with the products TSMC makes for NVIDIA et al.

That news rattled the Korean traders, then it rattled Wall Street, and so that means, predictably, Australian investors are spooked too. That the KOSPI fell so sharply is because CXMT appears to be beating out Korea’s Samsung and Hynix in developing in-house AI tech.

(There’s also the fact Brent Crude climbed to US$106/bbl overnight.)

Tonight we get US CPI data but we’ll talk more about that for the ASX Today market wrap.

So what’s happening at home today? Not much by way of ABS data; labour force data for September is due tomorrow but whether that moves the market or not really depends on how hungry for catalysts the market is.

Let’s take a look around what’s happening on the market today.

Rio Tinto says it’s boosted copper production by 29% at its Mongolia-based Oyu Tolgoi project;

Mayne Pharma has issued a trading halt expected to lift Friday in relation to a recent Supreme Court of NSW decision around Mayne’s terminated takeover offer from a company called Cosette, and,

HotCopper radar-lander Sun Silver has reported rapid silver and gold recoveries from metwork in cyanide leach testwork from its Maverick Silver Project.

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