Goldman Sachs raises Asia ex-Japan index target amid tech strength

Goldman Sachs just handed Asian tech bulls a fresh reason to feel vindicated. The bank’s equity strategy team, led by Timothy Moe, lifted its 12-month target for the MSCI Asia Pacific ex-Japan Index to 1,080, up from 990, implying roughly 17.2% upside from early June levels.

The catalyst is familiar but increasingly hard to ignore: AI-related hardware demand is turbocharging earnings across North Asia, and Goldman thinks the rally has more room to run.

The numbers behind the upgrade

Goldman’s revised target didn’t arrive in isolation. The bank simultaneously upgraded Taiwan’s equity rating to overweight and jacked up its KOSPI target for South Korea from 9,000 to 12,000. That South Korea call implies a staggering 36.3% upside.

The earnings revisions underpinning these calls are genuinely eye-catching. Goldman raised its 2026 EPS growth forecast for the broader MSCI Emerging Markets Index from 45% to 55%, with the revision driven almost entirely by anticipated demand for AI hardware. North Asia’s projected earnings growth for 2026 sits far above the regional average.

As of early June, the MSCI Asia Pacific ex-Japan Index was up 27% year-to-date. Strip out South Korea and Taiwan, though, and the rest of the region was actually down 4%.

Why AI hardware is the engine

Taiwan’s semiconductor ecosystem, anchored by foundries producing the advanced chips that power AI training and inference, has become arguably the most strategically important supply chain on Earth. South Korea’s memory chip manufacturers, including SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, produce the high-bandwidth memory that AI servers consume in vast quantities.

Goldman’s Moe reiterated the bullish KOSPI stance as recently as September 2026, arguing that the surge in demand for memory chips is expected to extend through 2028 and beyond.

A tale of two Asias

The concentration risk embedded in this rally deserves attention. A 27% year-to-date gain for the broader index sounds impressive until you realize the non-tech portion of Asia ex-Japan is nursing losses. Markets across Southeast Asia, parts of South Asia, and other segments of the region haven’t participated in the AI-driven updraft.

Memory chips in particular have a long history of boom-bust cycles. Goldman’s call that the cycle extends through 2028 is a bet that AI demand growth will outpace capacity additions for at least two more years.

When a bank with Goldman’s influence signals overweight on Taiwan and raises a South Korea target by 36.3%, it tends to move allocations across the institutional landscape.

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