OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra Lifts Korean Chip Stocks, With Samsung and SK Hynix Up Sharply

South Korean semiconductor stocks climbed across the board early Sept. 7 after OpenAI unveiled its next-generation artificial intelligence model, reviving expectations for another round of spending on AI infrastructure.

Samsung Electronics was up 3.91% at 265,500 won in morning trading, while SK Hynix rose 5.46% to 1,737,000 won. SK Square gained 5.67%, Samsung Electronics preferred shares added 2.30%, DB HiTek jumped 12.90%, and Samsung Electro-Mechanics advanced 3.34%.

The catalyst was OpenAI’s new AI model, GPT-6 Astra, introduced on Sept. 3. OpenAI President Greg Brockman said Astra can handle most tasks humans perform on computers and described it as an early stage of artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

Performance data released by OpenAI also drew market attention. A pet-care search task that takes a person about 30 minutes was completed by Astra in 5 minutes and 27 seconds. A job-search information task that typically takes about five hours was finished in 2 minutes and 51 seconds. Astra also posted stronger results than Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 on coding benchmarks including Terminal-Bench 4.0 and DeepSWE v1.1.

Expectations for a further buildout of AI computing infrastructure also boosted demand prospects for chips. Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang wrote on X that Astra was trained using more than 100,000 of Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell NVLink72 systems, adding that “AGI has arrived.” He also said another 400,000 GPUs are due to be deployed. Expectations that competition in large AI models will continue to intensify are helping fuel bets on demand for memory products including high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, as well as GPUs.

Related stocks had already rallied in U.S. trading. Micron rose 6.10%, Sandisk gained 11.90%, Seagate advanced 6.34%, and Western Digital climbed 5.86%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index added 3.38%, while SK Hynix’s American depositary receipts jumped 8.14%.