An Uncharted Path... 'AI Uncertainty' Shakes the Market

[Anchor]

Recently, the stock market has been driven by the AI industry. As this is an uncharted path, whenever questions arose regarding investment and profitability, the market experienced massive fluctuations.

Reporter Min Gyeongho analyzes what kind of question mark led to this sharp decline this time.

[Reporter]

Experts explain that such high volatility is fundamentally because humanity has never experienced the AI industry before.

There is no way of knowing just how large the industry can grow or whether a cycle even exists.

However, falling behind means being left out, so companies are busy investing regardless of profitability uncertainties.

[Christophe Fouquet / ASML CEO (December of last year): It is a sort of arms race. If you do not invest now, you get left behind.]

As a result, the stock market, which weighs profitability, has fluctuated whenever concerns over investment scale and returns emerged.

This time, doubts were raised at the level of a specific industrial sector rather than individual AI companies.

A forecast emerged that AI data center revenue needs to reach $8.5 trillion by 2030 to achieve target returns, but it is likely to fall short at around $3.6 trillion at best.

Market research firm Gartner specifically pointed to the neocloud industry.

This refers to cloud services specialized in AI model training and inference based on GPUs, and it warned that 80% of this sector might not survive.

The stock price of CoreWeave, a representative neocloud player, immediately dropped by 15%.

Hitherto, whenever questions about profitability were raised, big tech companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Micron provided answers based on their earnings, and stock prices rebounded.

Experts note that the essence of the doubts raised this time is the same, and they are closely watching the upcoming big tech earnings announcements starting in earnest next week.

[Lee Jin-woo / Head of Research Center, Meritz Securities: Ultimately, the ones right at the center of it need to provide a solution once again. More concrete explanations must reassure the market to overcome this, or we will just return to the same repetitive cycle.]

It is also necessary to pay attention to what messages will come out from the U.S. Federal Reserve's rate decision scheduled for the early hours of the 29th, our time.

The September consumer price index growth rate, which exceeded expectations, acted as a major factor in the stock price decline, because additional interest rate hikes increase financing costs and ultimately worsen investment profitability.

[Video Editing: Kim Jong-mi]
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.