Goldman Cuts Kospi 12-Month Target by 25% as AI Trade Unravels

Goldman Sachs strategists cut their 12-month target for South Korea's Kospi Index by 25%, reversing a year of repeated upgrades as worries about the artificial intelligence trade intensify.

The move matters because of its direction and its scale. Goldman had raised the Kospi target multiple times this year, so a 25% reduction marks a sharp reversal from a bank that had been chasing the rally higher. A cut of that size, rather than a modest trim, signals the strategists see a materially different risk profile for the benchmark than they did at their last revision.

The stated driver is the AI trade. Goldman ties the downgrade to growing concerns over that theme, which implies the bank views the index's upside as heavily exposed to AI sentiment. That linkage is interpretation drawn from the cited rationale, not additional reporting, but it frames the target cut as a call on positioning and narrative risk as much as on Korean fundamentals.

For a major Wall Street house to abandon its prior optimism after serial raises is the kind of shift that can pressure sentiment across AI-linked assets, particularly in a market where the bank's own forecasts had been climbing.