Hardly a week had passed since Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced plans to supply 260,000 GPUs to Korea when U.S. President Donald Trump declared that the Blackwell chips, the most advanced GPUs, would be sold only within the United States.

Following the president’s stern remarks on Monday, primarily concerned with sales to China, the stocks of Korea’s biggest manufacturers that Huang pledged the provision to — Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and Hyundai Motor — all slumped on Tuesday.

Samsung Electronics plunged 5.58 percent to close at 104,900 won ($73), marking the largest daily loss since Aug. 5, 2024, despite robust gains throughout last week during the Nvidia CEO's visit to Korea, when the announcement was made.

SK hynix, a primary memory supplier to Nvidia, also lost 5.48 percent on Tuesday, while Hyundai Motor nose-dived 5.32 percent. Naver, a Korean tech giant that was also promised a large amount of Nvidia GPUs, tumbled 2.73 percent.

Trump indicated that Nvidia’s Blackwell chip should be offered exclusively in the United States, during a taped interview that aired on Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes" program and in comments to reporters aboard Air Force One. The high-performing chips symbolize the United States’ push for onshoring, as their wafers are produced at TSMC’s factory in Phoenix, Arizona. Then, the batch is still required to be sent to a Taiwanese factory for packaging.

"The most advanced, we will not let anybody have them other than the United States," he told CBS, broadening the scope to include other nations on top of China, while remarking on the Blackwell, "We don't give that chip to other people."

Despite the threat, Reuters reported Tuesday that Microsoft has the Trump administration’s approval to export Nvidia chips for its data centers in the United Arab Emirates.

While it remains unclear whether the comment would affect the supply of the Nvidia GPUs promised to Korea last week, investment sentiment soured.

“Given Nvidia’s outsized influence on local chipmakers and other big manufacturers, any negative news associated with Nvidia now could deal a blow to them,” said a source in the local semiconductor industry.

Samsung, SK hynix and Hyundai Motor were each guaranteed 50,000 GPUs, most of which belong to the Blackwell lineup, although the specific details of those agreements are elusive.


“Samsung, SK Group and Hyundai Motor Group are each building AI factories with up to 50,000 Nvidia GPUs apiece, while Naver plans to deploy more than 60,000,” the Santa Clara, California, chip designer said in a statement released on Friday.

Still, analysts believe that the decline in stocks could be short-lived, attributing it in part to profit taking by investors.

“Samsung’s partnership with Nvidia to build the world’s largest AI factory will expand into next-generation memory supply — including HBM4, HBM3E, GDDR7 and system on a chip-attached modules — as well as foundry cooperation,” said Kim Dong-won, an analyst at KB Securities.

Han Dong-hee, an analyst at SK Securities, revised up the target prices of both Samsung and SK hynix to 170,000 won and 1 million won, respectively, fueled by a large-scale AI boom that has generated an explosive demand for high-performing memory chips.