Path Never Walked Before... Market Shaken by AI Uncertainty

[Anchor]

The plunge in the domestic stock market is attributed to growing speculation that the surge in semiconductor demand may decelerate faster than expected. Representative projections include concerns that higher-than-expected U.S. inflation figures will drive up interest rates—in other words, the financing costs for big tech companies that purchase semiconductors—and that data center revenue may also fall short of expectations.

Reporter Min Gyeongho has the details.

[Reporter]

Experts explain that such high volatility fundamentally stems from the fact that we have never experienced an industry like AI before.

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

However, because falling behind once means getting left behind, companies are busy investing regardless of profitability uncertainties.

[Christophe Fouquet / ASML CEO (December of last year): It's kind of an arms race. If you don't invest now, you get left behind.]

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

This time, doubts have been raised at the level of a specific industry segment rather than individual AI companies.

Projections showed that AI data center revenue must reach 8.5 trillion dollars by 2030 to achieve target returns, but it is likely to fall short at around 3.6 trillion dollars at best.

Market research firm Gartner specifically pointed to the neocloud industry.

It is a GPU-based cloud service specialized in AI model training and inference, and it warned that 80% of this sector may not survive.

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

Whenever questions over profitability arose in the past, big tech firms such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Micron provided answers based on their earnings, and stock prices rebounded.

Noting that the core nature of the doubts raised this time remains the same, experts are paying close attention to the big tech earnings reports that officially kick off starting next week.

[Lee Jin-woo / Head of Research Center, Meritz Securities: Ultimately, those at the very center need to present a solution once more. More concrete explanations must reassure the market to overcome this, otherwise we will just return to the same repetitive cycle.]

It is also worth noting what kind of message will emerge from the U.S. Federal Reserve's interest rate decision scheduled for the early hours of the 29th, according to our time.

Higher-than-expected September consumer price index growth served as a major factor in the stock price decline, as additional 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.