‘깐부’의 밀약과 ‘검은 월요일’의 공포: AI 반도체 신화는 흔들리는가 > K-wave Trends

The rapid volatility in the market is not simply due to the poor performance of specific companies, but is interpreted as the result of the explosion of the ‘AI bubble loan’ that has dominated the market, combined with a realistic decline in investment sentiment. As the New York stock market's Philadelphia Semiconductor Index recorded its largest drop since 2020, fear in the domestic stock market also reached its peak, with the KOSPI 8,000 line collapsing and a circuit breaker being activated. In particular, individual investors who belatedly jumped into the ‘semiconductor duopoly’ of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are quickly pushed into the loss zone and are expressing their anxiety through social media. Due to adverse macroeconomic factors such as a surge in exchange rates, the sentiment of avoiding risky assets is dominating the overall market.

However, in contrast to the market's cries, Jensen Huang, a key party in the field, directly refuted the market's concerns, calling the current stock price adjustment 'an opportunity to buy at a low price.' He said that he will continue to procure billions of dollars every year through a long-term partnership with SK Hynix, and reiterated his confidence that AI will become an essential infrastructure like the Internet. The joint development of next-generation memory and the digital twin-based process efficiency strategy agreed upon by Chairman Taewon Choi and CEO Hwang indicate that the cooperation between the two companies has gone beyond the level of simple product supply and has entered the stage of ‘technological integration’ encompassing from semiconductor design to manufacturing.

In the securities world, the dominant view is that the essence of this adjustment is interpreted not as a slowdown in demand, but as a process of ‘specification reallocation’ for system optimization. The analysis is that the downward adjustment of memory adoption for Vera CPUs, which some are concerned about, is not a decrease in overall demand, but a strategic choice to build a more efficient system. In fact, major analytical institutions such as SK Securities maintain the forecast that the memory supply shortage has not yet been resolved and that the HBM price increase will continue until 2027. In other words, the diagnosis is that although the fundamentals are solid, short-term liquidity fears are overshadowing the true nature.

Technically speaking, the scope of cooperation between SK Hynix and NVIDIA is expanding in all directions, from personal RTX Spark PC to Jetson Tor, an autonomous robot platform. Beyond simply supplying high-bandwidth memory (HBM), we are advancing the digital twin of the process by directly introducing software libraries such as NVIDIA's CUDA-X to semiconductor manufacturing sites. This is the process of building an overwhelming entry barrier that competitors cannot easily match, and this technological advantage is expected to become a key driving force that will structurally increase the company's operating profit and performance visibility in the future.

Of course, this is a time when investors still need to be cautious. As KB Securities analyzed, the process of a leading stock becoming an outlier that will remain in history is never smooth, and the volatility period that tests investors' patience is bound to be repeated several times. The macro environment, such as rising interest rates and concerns about an economic slowdown, still remains a factor of uncertainty, and there is a high risk of damaging long-term returns if you try to hastily hit highs and lows. It should not be overlooked that the current adjustment may be an opportunity to alleviate the concentration phenomenon represented by ‘Samjeonix’ and create a virtuous cycle of supply and demand in other major industries.