On August 18, SK hynix fell 3.82% in pre-market trading, trading at 164.28 USD/share, with turnover of approximately 24.55 million USD. The broader storage chip sector declined in tandem, with Micron Technology and Western Digital each dropping around 4%.

On the news front, the storage sector had rallied sharply over the preceding sessions after SK hynix Chairman Chey Tae-won warned that next year would see the most severe \"memory shortage\" in history, with all customers demanding nearly double their original supply volumes. The company also announced a massive 7,200 billion USD expansion plan for AI memory capacity in Korea and the U.S. The significant short-term cumulative gains have now triggered notable profit-taking pressure.

Adding to bearish sentiment, multiple Korean brokerages recently cut SK hynix's target price by approximately 30%, reflecting growing concerns that the memory chip cycle may be peaking. Meanwhile, Korean retail investors have been aggressively buying SK hynix ADR at roughly a 10% premium and piling into triple-leveraged semiconductor ETFs — behavior flagged by analysts as a speculative overheating signal likely to amplify short-term volatility.

(The above content is based on publicly available market information, generated by a program or algorithm, and is intended solely as a stock movement alert. It does not constitute investment advice or a basis for trading decisions.)