One signal

South Korea recorded a record current-account surplus in the second quarter as demand for chips and rising memory prices boosted exports, the South China Morning Post reports.

Chip exports reached US$113.89 billion in the three months to June, up 181.6 per cent on a year earlier, according to government figures cited by the paper. That is a striking measure of how much computing hardware matters to South Korea’s trade. The figure covers chips broadly, rather than AI chips alone, so the headline’s AI link should not be mistaken for a separate AI-chip export total.

Discuss: Should South Korea prioritise protecting its chip export boom, or prepare more urgently for a downturn in memory prices?

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