Memory chip stocks extended their decline on Thursday after Alphabet Inc.'s Google announced a research breakthrough that could make storage usage for artificial intelligence development significantly more efficient.

Market leaders in South Korea, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, fell more than 6% and approximately 5% respectively in Seoul. In the United States, Micron Technology, Western Digital, and SanDisk all dropped over 2% in pre-market trading, following losses at Wednesday's close.

Over the past few months, memory chip companies have performed strongly, as rapid development in AI infrastructure drove chip prices higher, boosting profits and share prices. Four hyperscale tech companies, led by Amazon and Google, plan to spend approximately $650 billion this year on data center construction, leading to massive purchases of Nvidia's AI accelerators and related memory chips.

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won recently stated that the memory chip shortage is expected to persist until 2030.

However, Google's new technology is expected to alleviate some of the shortage and could put downward pressure on prices. The company announced the research on platform X this week, although the related findings were initially published as early as last year.

Google stated that its TurboQuant technology can significantly reduce the amount of memory required to run large language models, thereby lowering the overall cost of AI training. Investors are likely concerned that this could reduce demand for memory from hyperscale cloud service providers, easing the memory shortage that has driven up prices for smartphones and consumer electronics.