In early June 2026, AI and chip stocks lost roughly $1.3 trillion in combined market value in a matter of days.
Investors who had been riding the AI wave suddenly started asking whether the trade had run too far ahead of reality. Nvidia shares had pulled back more than 15% from their May peak. Alphabet had fallen more than 11% from its May high over the same period.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, was in Seoul for business meetings. He walked out between them and told investors exactly what he thought they should do with a falling market.
Jensen Huang’s Seoul buy-the-dip call on AI stocks explained
“We’re at the beginning of it, and whatever happened to the stock market, you should be very happy because now you can buy at a discount. Everybody should be very excited,,” Huang told reporters in Seoul on June 8, as TheStreet reported.
The remarks came as South Korea’s KOSPI index was falling sharply that morning, dropping more than 8% intraday and triggering circuit breakers, weighed down by the same AI fears hitting U.S. markets. Huang’s decision to make a public buying call while the Korean market was declining in real time was deliberate, according to Bloomberg.
Related: Nvidia makes revealing bet on secretive lab
None of this was new from Huang. A month earlier at Computex he said the same thing, that every data center, every factory, every enterprise would eventually run AI all the time.
Seoul wasn’t a reaction to a bad week in markets. It was the same speech he’s been giving, just with better timing.
Huang is not a disinterested observer. He runs the company most directly tied to the AI infrastructure trade. But his confidence came with receipts.
Nvidia’s fiscal fourth-quarter revenue came in at $68.1 billion, up 73% year over year, with data center revenue of $62.3 billion making up over 91% of that total, according to CNBC. Within hours of making those remarks in Seoul, he and SK Hynix announced a multi-year deal to co-develop next-generation AI memory chips, putting action behind the words.
How Nvidia stock performed after Huang’s buy-the-dip call
Two months on, the results are modest but real. Investors who bought Nvidia shares on June 8 and held them would be up 5.1% as of early August, narrowly ahead of the S&P 500‘s 4.3% gain over the same stretch, according to The Motley Fool.
Widen the bet beyond Nvidia alone, and the picture looks considerably better. A basket split evenly between Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet returned about 8.5% over the same window, roughly double the S&P 500’s gain.
More Nvidia:
- Nvidia just made a move Wall Street wasn’t ready for
- Nvidia just locked down deal that changes AI race
- Nvidia stock is doing something it hasn’t done in years
Microsoft was up 18.5% and Amazon up 11.1% on the strength of their own earnings. Alphabet was down 0.5% over the same period.
Huang was not describing a two-month trade when he made those comments. He was pointing years into the future, arguing that the spending underway represented the earliest stage of a much longer buildout rather than a peak.
Nvidia SK Hynix $500 billion deal and the AI buildout timeline
That longer-term framing has kept showing up in Nvidia’s own actions since June.
On July 24, Nvidia and SK Group unveiled a partnership worth more than $500 billion over several years, locking down AI memory supply from SK Hynix and building large-scale data centers expected to come online in 2027, according to CNBC.
As part of that same initiative, SK Telecom agreed to build a 2-gigawatt AI data center powered by Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips and SK Hynix’s next-generation memory. Nvidia also separately invested in Korean cloud company Naver to expand its AI computing capacity.
The total value of new AI agreements announced on that single day reached roughly $950 billion, as TheStreet reported.
SK Hynix has kept following that money. On Aug. 8, its board approved roughly $38.3 billion in additional expansion across two domestic sites through 2031, effectively betting its future on staying Nvidia’s primary memory supplier rather than diversifying its production.
Angela/Getty Images
What Jensen Huang’s AI call means for NVDA stock investors
None of this guarantees the trade stays smooth. SK Hynix’s own Nasdaq ADR debut on July 10 drew demand for more than seven times the shares on offer, only for the stock to give back much of its first-day gain within days of U.S. trading.
A reminder of how quickly enthusiasm around AI names can reverse, even when the underlying demand story is intact.
Selling into a rally that is technically beating the market might feel tempting for investors nervous about a repeat of the June selloff. But Huang’s original comments were never really about the next two months. The deals signed since suggest his own company is still positioning as if the buildout has years left to run.
For now, the scoreboard reads narrowly in Huang’s favor on Nvidia alone, and considerably more in his favor if you believed him broadly enough to spread the bet across the sector he was really describing.
Related: Nvidia’s CEO just pointed at the part of AI that worries him most
