Temasek is conducting a new round of investment in Samsung and SK Hynix, marking its first investment in the South Korean stock market

August 12th – Temasek, one of Asia's largest sovereign wealth funds, is investing in Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix in a new round of funding. This marks Temasek's first entry into the South Korean stock market.

According to government sources and institutions on August 12th, Temasek recently decided to invest in Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. It is reported that they have been in contact with the South Korean government to discuss the timing of the investment execution.

Reportedly, Temasek has chosen to directly manage the investment using internal staff instead of entrusting it to external asset management companies. A financial regulatory official stated, "From what I understand, after the government approved the single-stock leverage ETF, there was extreme volatility in the stock prices of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. Temasek communicated with us regarding the timing of fund entry into the market." This is Temasek's first investment in the South Korean stock market.

It is known that Temasek believes that the storage semiconductor sector is the most undervalued in the artificial intelligence (AI) value chain. An industry insider commented, "Temasek's investment style is to inject large-scale funds into industries that hold a dominant market position from a long-term perspective," and added, "Although the stock prices of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have risen by over 880% from last year's low point, this action indicates that Temasek firmly believes there is still room for further upside."

Despite concerns about overheating leading to a cooling of AI investment enthusiasm, Temasek continues to increase its bets on the entire AI value chain. In the second quarter of this year, the institution concentrated its investments in areas such as semiconductors, data centers, cloud services, AI model developers, and software infrastructure. Through these deployments, Temasek plans to increase the proportion of AI-related assets in its entire investment portfolio from 6% to a maximum of 15% within the next five years. The institution believes that AI semiconductors are a long-term growth engine that will drive structural industry changes, rather than a passing trend, and plans to expand its investments based on this belief.

According to Temasek's 13F filing submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on August 7th, as of the end of June, the institution held shares in Nvidia and TSMC, as well as in the world's largest semiconductor lithography equipment company, ASML. In addition, Temasek is also one of the major institutional investors in generative AI developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Temasek is a state-owned investment company fully owned by the Singapore Ministry of Finance, and as of the end of March this year, its assets under management amounted to SGD 518 billion (approximately KRW 572 trillion).