CoreWeave has never named Samsung Electronics or SK hynix in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Not once, in any document it has ever submitted. It has never used the word memory, and it has never written the letters HBM. On 12 August, the day after its results, Samsung closed up 6.7 per cent and SK hynix up 5.5 per cent, and the Kospi tripped a program-trading curb on the way. The day before that, Korea published the largest ten-day semiconductor export figure in its history, and the same two stocks did almost nothing.
Last verified: 12 August 2026. Built from CoreWeave’s Q2 2026 filing and every SEC document it has ever lodged, from the Korea Customs Service release of 11 August, and from Bank of Korea and company disclosures. One warning before you start: we could not reach the Korea Exchange’s own data service, so every Korean market figure here is a press report citing KRX, not KRX. We mark each one.
Editor’s opinion
This is a sentiment link, and calling it a demand link will cost someone money
Our view is that Korean memory shares now trade as a leveraged proxy for American AI sentiment, and that this is a different thing from trading on American AI demand. The two look identical on a green day. They come apart on the day the sentiment turns while the demand is still arriving.
The evidence sits in the same week. Korea’s record export print landed on 11 August and moved the two stocks 4.1 and 0.4 per cent. A US company that buys nothing from either of them reported on 11 August and moved them 6.7 and 5.5 per cent on 12 August. In the same ten-day window, exports to the United States fell 0.2 per cent and exports to Taiwan fell 4.4 per cent, while exports to China rose 134.8 per cent. And on 29 July SK hynix reported a 76 per cent operating margin and fell 9.6 per cent, because it was below what analysts wanted.
Against that, and at full strength: the mechanism is real even if the accounting is indirect. SK hynix has signed long-term agreements with about ten customers and says demand exceeds its supply capability. Samsung says the market will stay undersupplied. CoreWeave’s finance chief said the company is passing rising component costs to customers and that GPUs cost more than they did, which is what memory scarcity looks like three steps downstream. The view survives because collecting in 2027 and repricing in an afternoon are separate events, and only one of them happened this week.
Andrew Lee. This section argues a view, not a fact. It is not a forecast, not a recommendation and not a valuation. The sources below carry the material it draws on.
Zero mentions, in every filing CoreWeave has ever made
We ran CoreWeave’s full SEC record through the commission’s own full-text search: registration statements, annual reports, quarterly reports, current reports, everything under its filer number. Samsung returns nothing. SK hynix returns nothing. HBM returns nothing. The phrase high bandwidth memory appears only in registration documents describing the industry, never in a periodic report.
What the annual report does disclose is a company buying finished systems. It states plainly that it does not manufacture the components it uses, that all the GPUs in its infrastructure are NVIDIA GPUs, and that three suppliers accounted for 23, 20 and 17 per cent of total purchases in 2025. It does not name any of the three. So a CoreWeave dollar reaches a Korean memory fab only after passing through a system builder and then through NVIDIA, which is the party that actually buys the memory. Count the steps yourself: there are at least two, and CoreWeave discloses neither.
There is exactly one exception, and it is worth knowing precisely because it is so narrow. The only component supplier CoreWeave has named aloud is Solidigm, in a long-term agreement its chief executive described as de-risking access to critical inputs. Solidigm is SK hynix’s NAND storage business, bought from Intel; we went through that structure when SK hynix moved to list it in SK hynix is listing Solidigm on the Nasdaq. CoreWeave does not mention that ownership. And storage is not memory: this is a NAND contract, not an HBM one.
What CoreWeave reported, and three things the Korean coverage got wrong
Revenue was 2,575 million dollars, up 112 per cent. Net loss was 626 million against 290 million a year earlier. Revenue backlog reached about 104 billion dollars, up 246 per cent, with more than 25 billion of further commitments added in early Q3. Contracted power reached 3.7 gigawatts at quarter end and 4.2 by the day of the release. Full-year revenue guidance went to 12.4 to 13.2 billion dollars, and capital expenditure guidance to 35 to 39 billion.
Three details are circulating in Korean coverage as second-quarter news and are not. Meta signed its additional 21 billion dollar commitment in March, and CoreWeave disclosed it with the first-quarter results. CoreWeave announced the Anthropic agreement on 10 April. The 6 billion dollar Jane Street compute contract dates from 15 April; the second-quarter Jane Street item is a separate 1 billion dollar equity investment. Reading the quarter as though it contained four landmark contracts overstates it by three.
Why the loss widened while revenue doubled
The arithmetic is clean and it matters for how fast Korea gets paid. Revenue rose 1,363 million year on year and adjusted EBITDA rose 757 million. Over the same span depreciation rose 834 million and net interest rose 373 million, to 640 million for the quarter alone. Those two together outran the EBITDA gain, operating income turned negative, and the loss widened. Total debt stood at about 35.1 billion dollars against 6.9 billion of cash. In the quarter, financing supplied roughly fifteen times more cash than operations did. CoreWeave is building the asset base far faster than the revenue from it can ramp, which is the same lag, in a different currency, that governs when Korean memory revenue actually books.
The record export number did not move the stocks
On 11 August the Korea Customs Service published exports of 21,286 million dollars for the first ten days of August, up 45.3 per cent and the largest ever for the period. Semiconductors were 9,952 million dollars, up 155.4 per cent, also a record. Before you discount that for the calendar: the release publishes the adjustment itself, and there were 7.0 working days in both years, giving a daily-average growth rate of 45.3 per cent. It is the same number. There is no calendar artefact in it.
The destination table in the same release is the part nobody has reported. In the ten days that produced Korea’s record, exports to the United States fell and exports to Taiwan fell. Everything that grew, grew towards China.
Korea Customs Service, 1 to 10 August 2026, provisional
Korea’s record export ten days were a China event, not an America event
| Destination | Exports, $m | Change on a year earlier | Share of total |
|---|---|---|---|
| China | 6,746 | +134.8% | 31.7% |
| Vietnam | 2,390 | +45.4% | 11.2% |
| United States | 2,045 | −0.2% | 9.6% |
| Hong Kong | 1,578 | +259.4% | 7.4% |
| European Union | 1,501 | +57.2% | 7.1% |
| Taiwan | 1,101 | −4.4% | 5.2% |
| Japan | 649 | +20.3% | 3.0% |
Shares are ours, computed against the 21,286 million dollar total. These are all-goods figures, not semiconductor-only: customs does not publish a ten-day destination split for semiconductors alone. Two honest qualifications. The American fall is mostly cars, which collapsed 80.9 per cent on a shift in the timing of Korean summer factory shutdowns. And customs records a large part of SK hynix’s HBM output as an export to Taiwan, because TSMC does the packaging, so Taiwan plus the United States, at 14.8 per cent here, is the fairer proxy for AI-linked demand. Both of those numbers fell in the record window.
Most of the growth is price, and Korea’s own statistics say so
The Bank of Korea publishes an export value index and an export volume index, free, monthly, and you can pull them apart yourself. For June 2026 the value index rose 74.8 per cent year on year while the volume index rose 29.8 per cent. The gap is price. The state research institute KDI has made the same point repeatedly through 2026, noting in its July report that semiconductor export volume growth had moderated while value stayed strong on price. A 155.4 per cent export number is mostly memory costing more, not mostly more memory leaving the country. That is a good outcome for Korean margins. It is a weaker link to any particular American customer’s order book.
Two stocks are now most of the market, and that is what you are watching
Samsung and SK hynix accounted for 53.58 per cent of all Kospi trading value by 19 June 2026, up from 38.13 per cent at the end of 2025. Those are Korea Exchange figures, quoted by the head of the Financial Supervisory Service, who described the effect in June as the tail wagging the dog. On 12 August the index rose 3.68 per cent while 387 shares advanced and 483 declined. An index can rise on a falling majority when two names are that large, and what looks like a market judgement on AI is partly an arithmetic consequence of index weight.
The volatility tracks Korean rules, not American earnings
The clearest case is 31 July, when the Kospi rose 17.91 per cent, the largest single-day gain in its history. That was the day a rule took effect requiring 30 million won in cash before an investor could buy a single-stock leverage product. We wrote up those products and the rules governing them in Korea’s single-stock leverage ETF rules. Note also that Korean circuit breakers only halt falls, so a rise of that size trips nothing but a sidecar.
| Date | Kospi close | Move | What happened that day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 29 Jul 2026 | — | SK hynix −9.6% | Record 76% operating margin, below what analysts wanted |
| 30 Jul 2026 | 5,593.56 | −1.23% | Lowest close since April |
| 31 Jul 2026 | 6,595.45 | +17.91% | Largest single-day gain on record. Leverage deposit rule took effect |
| 3 Aug 2026 | 6,257.45 | −5.12% | Kosdaq rose 2.44% the same day |
| 6 Aug 2026 | about 6,296 | −4.58% | Sell-side sidecar, foreigners net sellers |
| 11 Aug 2026 | 6,345.53 | +0.73% | Record export print. Samsung +4.13%, SK hynix +0.35% |
| 12 Aug 2026 | 6,579.04 | +3.68% | Day after CoreWeave. Samsung +6.68%, SK hynix +5.54% |
Three corrections to the 12 August figures
The program-trading curb was the twenty-third buy-side sidecar of 2026, not the twenty-third overall; Korea counts buy and sell separately and the combined total is roughly double. Institutions finished the day up 356 billion won, not the nearly one trillion now in circulation, which is a one o’clock snapshot mistaken for a closing total; foreigners did finish above two trillion, at 2.84 trillion. And the two stocks did not rise equally: 6.68 and 5.54 per cent at the close, against intraday peaks near 7 per cent. CoreWeave was also not the only catalyst that morning, with a report on Temasek investing and shareholder-return expectations both cited alongside it.
Sources
We take facts from these and write our own sentences. This article has an unusually sharp split between material we could verify at source and material we could not, so we have separated the lists by that split rather than by subject. Read the last two sections before you trust any Korean market number in this piece, including ours.
CoreWeave, at source
- CoreWeave, second quarter 2026 results, Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K, filed 11 August 2026. Source for revenue of 2,575 million dollars, the 626 million net loss, the 104 billion dollar backlog, the 25 billion of early-Q3 commitments, 3.7 gigawatts of contracted power, 640 million of net interest expense, and the balance sheet from which we take 35.1 billion of debt and 6.9 billion of cash. Guidance is not in this release; it is in the separate outlook presentation of the same date, which carries the 12.4 to 13.2 billion revenue range and the 35 to 39 billion capital expenditure range.
- CoreWeave, annual report on Form 10-K for 2025, filed 2 March 2026. Source for the statement that the company does not manufacture its components, that all its GPUs are NVIDIA GPUs, and that three unnamed suppliers were 23, 20 and 17 per cent of purchases.
- The zero-mention finding is ours and you can reproduce it. Use the SEC’s full-text search restricted to CoreWeave’s filer number, 0001769628, and substitute Samsung, HBM or memory for the search term. Full-text search covers 2001 onward, which is the whole of CoreWeave’s filing history.
Korea, at source
- Korea Customs Service, exports and imports, 1 to 10 August 2026, provisional, 11 August 2026. Source for every figure in the table above, for the 9,952 million dollar semiconductor line and its 155.4 per cent increase, and for the working-day footnote giving 7.0 days in both years and daily-average growth of 45.3 per cent. Two things this release says that are worth carrying: the figures are provisional and will not be final until February 2027, and the 46.8 per cent semiconductor share of exports is the second highest recorded, behind 47.0 per cent in early May 2026.
- Bank of Korea, ECOS statistics database, export value and export volume indices. Free, and the series that lets you separate price from quantity yourself. The June 2026 readings give value up 74.8 per cent and volume up 29.8 per cent year on year. The July release was not out when we published; it lands on 14 August 2026, so this article predates it.
The memory makers and NVIDIA, at source
- SK hynix, 2Q26 business results, 29 July 2026. Source for the long-term agreements with about ten customers and for the statement that customer demand exceeds supply capabilities. The company does not name a customer, does not give an HBM revenue share, and does not use the words sold out; we have not attributed any of those to it. Its net profit exceeded its revenue this quarter on investment gains, so we have used operating profit only.
- Samsung Electronics, Q2 2026 earnings presentation, 30 July 2026. Source for the company’s expectation that the market stays undersupplied and for scaled-up HBM4 sales. Samsung publishes no HBM volume or revenue figure.
- NVIDIA, first quarter fiscal 2027 results, 20 May 2026. Cited for what it does not contain: no HBM disclosure, no memory procurement disclosure, no named memory supplier. NVIDIA is the party that actually buys the memory in this chain and it discloses nothing about it. Its next results are due 26 August 2026, after this article.
Read but not primary
- CoreWeave second quarter 2026 earnings call, 11 August 2026, read in the corrected transcript CoreWeave hosts, prepared by FactSet CallStreet. Source for the Solidigm agreement, for the roughly 25 per cent July price increase across SKUs, and for the finance chief’s statement that the company is passing through component price increases. The call mentions neither memory, HBM nor DRAM anywhere; the inference that rising component costs reflect Korean memory pricing is ours, not the company’s.
- KDI, economic trends monthly, 2026 editions, for the finding that semiconductor export volume growth moderated while value growth held up on price. KDI is a state research institute, which makes it authoritative but not a statistical source; the Bank of Korea owns the underlying series and we link it above.
Korean market data, which we could not verify at source
This section exists because the Korea Exchange’s free data service defeated us. Its statistics pages render through JavaScript and its underlying data endpoint returned a logout response to every request, because it requires a session token minted by loading the page in a browser first. So we have no KRX-sourced number in this article.
- Every Kospi level, every daily percentage move, both Samsung and SK hynix closing prices, the sidecar timing and count, and all investor flow figures come from Korean press reports citing KRX — principally Yonhap, Newspim, Newsworks, Hankook Ilbo and Chosun Biz. That is one tier below what we would like. Treat the second decimal place with suspicion throughout.
- To check any of it yourself: index closes are at data.krx.co.kr under statistics, then basic statistics, then index, then stock indices, then individual index price trend. Investor flows are under statistics, basic statistics, stock, trading by investor. Sidecar and circuit-breaker records are not on that service at all; they are on KIND, at kind.krx.co.kr, under market measures.
- The 53.58 per cent trading-value concentration figure and the tail-wagging-the-dog remark are from the Financial Supervisory Service governor’s June 2026 comments as reported by Kukinews, citing KRX data. We flag one likely confusion in circulation: a figure near 52 per cent is also quoted for these two companies’ share of Kospi market capitalisation. Those are different measures and the trading-value series is the one we use here.
What we could not obtain at all
- The exact closing level for 6 August 2026 we could not pin below the round figure of about 6,296, and market capitalisations for 11 and 12 August we could not obtain. We mark both as such above rather than estimating them.
- CoreWeave’s own share price on 12 August we also could not confirm from an exchange source. Reports put it up around 14 to 16 per cent after hours on 11 August and higher again on 12 August, which is enough to establish direction and not enough to print a close.
Corrections
None yet. If you can point to a filing or a KRX record that contradicts anything above, we will correct it and say what changed.
Disclosure. The author holds no position in any company named in this article as of the date of publication. This is general information and analysis about reported results, published trade statistics and market structure. It is not investment advice, not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, and not a valuation or price forecast. Naming a company here is not a recommendation of it. Describing a share price move is not a prediction of the next one, and the argument above is specifically that recent moves are a poor guide to underlying demand. The section headed Editor’s opinion is comment, and we fence it off from the sourced material for that reason. We have not tailored anything here to your circumstances, and only a qualified adviser in your jurisdiction can do that. We are not registered as an investment adviser in any jurisdiction, and this site has no commercial relationship with any company, exchange or research provider named above. See the Editorial & Sourcing Policy and Disclaimer.