Selling Pressure Spreads in Tech Stocks, Korean Stocks Plunge Intraday
Affected by increased AI infrastructure capital spending by US tech giants and short-term cash flow pressure, Wall Street has raised doubts about the pace of AI monetization, and Asia-Pacific tech stocks collectively faced selling pressure on 10月30日. South Korea's KOSPI index opened lower and moved lower, plunging over 4.6% intraday, and triggered the Korea Exchange's 5-minute program trading halt Sidecar mechanism at 上午10時04分. Heavyweight stocks 三星電子 and SK海力士 also corrected together, with the market attributing the cause to the overnight plunge in US tech stocks and AI return-on-investment concerns after Alphabet earnings.
Alphabet Earnings Trigger Valuation Adjustment
Alphabet's Q3 revenue was slightly below market expectations, and due to continued expansion of AI data centers and computing infrastructure, quarterly free cash flow turned to negative over US$910 million, with the stock price plunging over 12% in a single day. 大華 Korea KOSPI 50 (009829) manager 賴昱廷 said this correction is closer to position adjustment under rapidly contracting risk appetite, rather than a reversal in the fundamentals of South Korea's tech industry. The market worries that AI commercialization is progressing slower than expected, triggering a re-evaluation of the profit timeline for the overall AI supply chain.
Arms Race Continues, Memory Demand Unchanged
From an industry perspective, 賴昱廷 noted that large technology companies including Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta remain in the AI arms race stage, with related capital spending not shrinking but continuing to expand. Reuters reported that Alphabet even plans to further increase AI infrastructure investment next year, showing that demand for cloud computing and generative AI remains far above supply. For South Korea's semiconductor industry, whether HBM, high-bandwidth memory, advanced packaging or AI server DRAM, the long-term demand logic has not changed, and this correction reflects concerns about an extended AI investment payback period, not disappearing AI demand.
No Systematic Withdrawal of Funds, Focus on Leading Companies
In terms of fund flows, Korean stocks have shown no signs of systematic withdrawal, with South Korean domestic funds and long-term institutional funds continuing to flow into equity funds and large heavyweight stocks recently, and the pullback on the 30日 was mainly profit-taking driven by declining risk appetite, with some funds still buying tech heavyweights on dips. 賴昱廷 believes volatility is also related to uncertainty ahead of the US presidential election, with funds entering an event-risk management phase and AI and semiconductor groups with larger gains becoming priority targets for adjustment. Valuations of large technology stocks have now corrected significantly, while corporate earnings outlooks have not been revised down simultaneously, making the situation more like valuation digestion in the AI investment cycle, with a 1-to-3-year perspective focusing on leading companies such as 三星電子 and SK海力士 that hold HBM and advanced memory technology advantages, where sentiment-driven corrections may instead provide medium- to long-term positioning value.