SK hynix's stock price plummeted more than 10% as soon as the market opened after the Lunar New Year holiday. Samsung Electronics is also showing weakness. The shock from the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup 'Deepseek', which rattled the U.S. stock market during the Lunar New Year holiday, appears to have been reflected belatedly.
SK hynix's shares were trading at 200,500 won on the KOSPI market at 9:11 a.m. on the 31st. The stock price fell by 9.28% (25,000 won) compared to the previous trading day. Early in the session, the price dropped to 194,800 won, briefly breaking through the 200,000 won mark. At the same time, Samsung Electronics' stock price also recorded a decline of 2.42% (1,300 won) from the previous trading day, standing at 52,400 won.
Previously, Deepseek claimed to have developed the open-source AI model 'Deepseek-R1' in two months with an investment of $5.58 million. This is one-tenth the training cost that Meta Platforms invested in its latest AI model, Llama 3. Nevertheless, the service quality of Deepseek-R1 was not inferior to existing American open-source AI models.
Concerns have arisen that demand for Nvidia's high-performance and high-cost products may not be as strong as expected. As a result, SK hynix, which supplies high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to Nvidia, has also been affected.
Deepseek has also been reported to have used the H800, which Nvidia released with reduced performance for Chinese export, for training its AI model. Samsung Electronics' HBM products are also used in the H800.
This case suggests that SK hynix and Samsung Electronics' stock prices may fluctuate in the short term. Goldman Sachs noted, "Considering that high-bandwidth memory (HBM) contracts are made annually, demand changes may have more pronounced effects after 2026," adding that "this could negatively impact the valuation of Korean memory semiconductor corporations in the short term."