[Anchor]

It is not just the cryptocurrency market where investment sentiment has frozen. Wall Street in New York also plummeted overnight. As skepticism over AI investments spread once again, the Nasdaq suffered its steepest decline in four months.

New York correspondent Kim Hyunwoo reports.

[Reporter]

New York City's stock market wrapped up the final trading session of October in a slump.

On the 30th local time, the tech-heavy Nasdaq tumbled by nearly 3%.

On a daily basis, it marked the sharpest drop since last June.

Plummeting more than 5% in October, the Nasdaq recorded its worst monthly performance in a year and seven months.

In particular, semiconductor giant Intel saw its shares plunge nearly 30% after its revenue outlook fell far short of market expectations, marking its worst single-day performance since 1974.

Due to the stock price drop, Intel's market capitalization shrank by about 140 billion dollars, or over 180 trillion won, in a single day.

Weighing down the overall market were doubts over the profitability of AI.

Investment sentiment sharply shrank as concerns spread over whether massive investments could actually translate into tangible profits.

[Dennis Polmer / Chief Investment Officer, Investment Advisory Firm: Big tech companies are continuously increasing the proportion of earnings they use for investments. It was 90% last year, became 95%, and now it has exceeded 100%.]

Moreover, with an increasing number of AI companies borrowing money to invest because their earnings are not enough, worries are growing over whether those debts can be repaid on time.

[Ryan Isherwood / Chief Investment Officer, Asset Management Firm: (The recent downward trend) also reflects concerns about financing issues. In the coming months, many semiconductor and AI stocks could struggle.]

If the AI craze has driven the stock market upward until now, AI is now pulling the market back down.

Experts point out that AI investments are now moving past vague expectations into a phase where they must prove concrete results.

(Reported by Lee Hee-hoon | Video edited by Shin Seeun)