**The most surprising finding is how lopsided the "AI surge" is. NVIDIA's price rose about 687-fold, while Samsung, the region's largest chipmaker, only rose about 5.6-fold.** The figures below are each stock's highest close divided by its lowest close from 2012 to Aug 2025 (steps 3–5). - **NVIDIA (NVDA):** the close ranges from about $0.26 to $179.27, a ratio of 687×. That is the widest spread of the 152 stocks. The next widest are Lasertec at 443×, Wolfspeed at 355×, HANMI Semiconductor at 284× and Rorze at 283×. - **Large incumbents barely moved by comparison.** Samsung's ratio is 5.6× (15,300 to 85,681 KRW). SK Hynix is 17.1×, Tokyo Electron 49.8×, and Kokusai Electric only 3.3×. - **The big gains went to smaller equipment and niche names:** HANMI (memory back-end equipment), Lasertec, Rorze, Alchip and BrainChip (229.9×). They outran the household-name chipmakers by one to two orders of magnitude. **Caveats:** - **The ratio is not a return.** The maximum could come before the minimum, and I did not check the order. - **Prices are in local currencies.** Only the ratios are comparable across stocks, not the price levels. - **Some rows look unreliable.** Step 0 found 461 rows where the close falls outside the high–low range. It also found 4,888 zero-volume rows and 6,840 flat days. Some extreme low values, such as BrainChip's 0.009, are penny-stock artefacts that inflate its ratio. - **The data is otherwise clean.** There are no duplicate stock-date keys, no rows with high below low, and no non-positive prices.