South Korea's exports jumped 83.5 percent from a year earlier to a record $120.9 billion in September, driven by surging demand for the memory chips that power artificial intelligence, preliminary customs data showed on Thursday. The figure surpassed the previous monthly record of $102.25 billion, set in June.

Semiconductors were the main driver. Chip exports rose roughly 260 percent to $60.3 billion, passing $60 billion for the first time and accounting for nearly half of all shipments. The trade ministry attributed the increase to higher volumes and higher prices amid rising demand for memory chips. Imports rose 26 percent to $71.09 billion, leaving an unprecedented monthly trade surplus of $49.85 billion. Other sectors were more mixed: petroleum product exports rose 72 percent to $7.22 billion and cosmetics climbed 31.4 percent to $1.51 billion, while car exports fell 5.5 percent to $6.05 billion, hurt by fewer working days during the Chuseok harvest holiday and a drop in used-car sales abroad.

By destination, shipments to China rose 123 percent to $26 billion, and those to the United States rose 137 percent to $24.33 billion. Exports to Southeast Asia grew 92.6 percent to $21.29 billion, and those to the European Union rose 20.9 percent to $8.65 billion.

For January to September, exports totaled $814.5 billion, already more than the full-year record set in 2025, which the sources put at about $709 billion. Trade trade minister Kim Jung-kwan called the result a valuable achievement that reflects the strength of Korean industry. He said the country is on track to reach $1 trillion in annual exports, but warned that growing global protectionism and tensions in the Middle East remain major uncertainties. The government, he said, will monitor changes in the trade environment and take preemptive measures to shield exporters from unexpected external shocks.

The figures underline how central chips have become to Asia's fourth-largest economy. SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, the country's leading chipmakers, together control roughly 80 percent of the global market for high-bandwidth memory and 60 percent of the market for dynamic random-access memory, according to Counterpoint Research. The boom has fed through to the wider economy: nominal GDP growth reached a five-decade high of 26.4 percent year-on-year in the April-June quarter, and the finance ministry forecasts real growth of 3 percent in 2026, which would be the strongest since 2017 outside the pandemic years. The benchmark Kospi stock index has risen nearly 60 percent this year. The concentration of gains in a single sector, however, leaves the export outlook closely tied to the durability of AI-related demand.