[비즈한국] As artificial intelligence (AI) leads innovation across our society and economy, it is filling the news every day and exerting a profound influence on financial markets. Recently, China's DeepSeek has emerged as a hot topic. On the 20th of last month, the Chinese AI company DeepSeek unveiled its reasoning-focused AI, 'R1'. R1 garnered attention for demonstrating performance similar to OpenAI's latest model, GPT-4o, while offering lower application programming interface (API) costs—the fees charged for model usage—compared to OpenAI.
Seo Young-jae, a researcher at Daishin Securities, stated, "As Chinese companies' AI technological prowess was evaluated to be about two years behind that of the U.S., this announcement caused a major stir among those working in the U.S. AI sector." Researcher Seo added, "In particular, because the U.S. government has been continuously strengthening export controls on AI semiconductors, no one expected China to catch up at such a rapid pace." Foreign media evaluated that U.S. export sanctions against China served as a catalyst for Chinese engineers to focus on efficient AI development.
Due to the DeepSeek shock, the stock market, centered on Big Tech stocks, was shaken. Following the plunge in NVIDIA's stock price on the New York Stock Exchange, the domestic stock market, which opened after the Lunar New Year holiday, also saw the stock prices of Samsung Electronics005930 and SK Hynix000660 plummet. This was driven by concerns that the AI development costs of global Big Tech firms might have been set excessively high.
Choi Seung-ho, a researcher at Sangsangin Securities, said, "From now on, AI may no longer be the exclusive domain of Big Tech," and added, "The reason DeepSeek shocked the market is that it suggests overwhelmingly high computing resources may not be required to implement high-performance models."
The market believes that if the DeepSeek model can be emulated, it will stimulate competition among domestic and foreign companies that previously found AI development difficult due to infrastructure cost issues. Some even predict that it is highly likely to have a positive impact on related industries and the market. The perspective is that this could serve as an opportunity for the mass popularization of AI, similar to the dot-com bubble era. Perhaps due to these expectations for latecomers, foreign investors in the domestic stock market have been net buyers of AI software companies such as Naver035420 and Kakao035720 this month.
Kim Sung-hwan, a researcher at Shinhan Securities, said, "In the 1980s, PCs were not popularized due to their high prices, but as continuous technological innovation led to a sharp drop in unit prices, they became explosively prevalent in the 1990s, leading the internet revolution."
Lee Jun-ho, a researcher at Hana Securities, forecasted, "The performance of open-source models is leveling up, and it seems clear that the price of AI models is gradually decreasing," adding, "Productivity in the internet and game software sectors, which are positioned at the very forefront of the AI value chain, will structurally improve, and we can even expect an increase in valuation multiples as AI services expand in the future."
Moreover, as the second Trump administration pushes for stronger AI technological capabilities, concerns regarding the large-scale AI capital expenditure (Capex) of U.S. Big Tech firms seem excessive. The planned capital expenditure for Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft (MS) this year is 320 billion dollars (approximately 466 trillion won), most of which is allocated to AI-related businesses, which is about a 40% increase over last year's total capital expenditure. Accordingly, expectations for Big Tech do not appear likely to fade.
Researcher Kim Sung-hwan analyzed, "Although DeepSeek developed a surprising reasoning model in terms of cost, questions remain about how they secured the data," and added, "Unless this issue is resolved, it is unlikely that the AI capital expenditures of Big Tech will be denied."
Meanwhile, apart from investments in AI companies, the overall market is being influenced by issues related to U.S. recurring tariff policies. In particular, after news broke that former U.S. President Donald Trump would impose a 25% additional tariff on all steel and aluminum products imported into the U.S. on the 9th (local time), the KOSPI index fell below the 2,500-point mark during intraday trading before barely recovering to close at the 2,520-point level. This is because predictions emerged that the impact on Korea would be limited as the tariff measures primarily target the European Union (EU). However, since uncertainty remains over how future policies will unfold, it appears likely to cause anxiety among investors for the time being.