One of the smallest countries on Earth has become the nerve center of the artificial intelligence boom.

South Korea, a nation nearly 1% the size of the U.S. and roughly as big as the state of Indiana, has been the uncontested top gainer of 2026.

The iShares MSCI South Korea ETF (NYSE:EWY) has rallied 112% year-to-date through June 16, delivering 11 times the return of the S&P 500, tracked by the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSE:SPY), data from CountryETFTracker shows.

What’s Making South Korea The Big Beneficiary Of The AI Buildout?

The answer fits on a memory chip.

South Korea sits at the heart of the global supply chain for high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, the specialized stacked DRAM that every Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) AI accelerator depends on to feed its compute.

Two Seoul-listed giants, SK Hynix Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., manufacture the overwhelming majority of the world’s HBM. As demand for AI infrastructure exploded through 2026, so did their order books, their pricing power, and their share prices.

The numbers inside EWY tell the whole story. SK Hynix, the fund’s largest position at 23.17% of assets, has surged 266.64% year-to-date.

Samsung, a near-equal 23.11% weight, is up 186.65%. Together the ...