Computing power shortage, faith collapse! Meta "selling computing power" triggers a global chip avalanche, causing a sudden 8% plunge in the South Korean stock market and foreign capital fleeing over 50 trillion Korean won in a single day.

Meta's plan to rent out idle computing resources, coupled with concerns about oversupply of investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, triggered a sharp sell-off in global chip stocks on Thursday. The Korean stock market was hit hardest, with the benchmark KOSPI index plunging more than 8% at one point during the trading session. Two major storage chip giants, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, both saw double-digit declines, leading to the exchange temporarily halting automated sell-off programs. The sell-off quickly spread from the US stock market to Asia and extended to new cloud companies offering GPU cloud rentals, posing the most serious test to the recent AI hardware investment logic. The KOSPI's steep decline triggered trading restrictions, with foreign investors pulling out more than 5 trillion Korean won in a single day. This chip stock sell-off was triggered by two key pieces of news. Meta's plan to launch "Meta Compute" cloud services challenged the scarcity of computing power logic. Meta is reportedly planning to launch a cloud infrastructure business to rent out its data center's idle computing power to external customers. This model is similar to SpaceX's previous practice of renting out idle computing power to companies like Anthropic. After this news was announced, Meta's own stock price rose nearly 9% against the market trend, surpassing $600, but this had a huge impact on the entire AI hardware supply chain. Union Bancaire Privee's managing director Vey-Sern Ling explicitly stated that Meta's consideration of selling "surplus computing power" indicates that it may have difficulty finding a good use for the computing power, or that construction may be excessive, which has a negative impact on companies in markets like South Korea. In addition, Apple Inc.'s negotiations with Chinese storage chip manufacturers also threatened the pricing power of Korean companies. Market rumors of Apple Inc. negotiating purchases with China's Yangtze Memory Technologies and ChangXin Memory Technologies added to concerns about the competitiveness of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. Global chip and AI concept stocks fell in tandem, with funds shifting from hardware to platform giants. The sell-off had already begun in the US stock market on Wednesday, showing a clear pattern of differentiation. Stocks directly related to AI computing, such as memory and rental companies, saw heavy declines - with Micron Technology, Inc. and SanDisk both dropping by over 10%, Intel Corporation and AMD falling by 9% and 6% respectively. New cloud companies specializing in GPU computing rentals were hit hard, with CoreWeave plummeting 14% and Nebulus dropping 17%, as investors feared that Meta would directly lower its computing power rental prices for AI developers. In contrast, NVIDIA Corporation only fell by 1.25% thanks to its core position, showing relative resilience. Large platform stocks like Apple Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Amazon.com, Alphabet Inc. Class C, and Tesla, Inc. all rose across the board. Some strategists see this as a shift of funds from pure AI hardware companies to platform companies that are more dominant in the next stage of AI spending. The downward trend seamlessly spread to Asian markets. The Japanese Nikkei 225 index fell by 2.5% on Thursday, while the MSCI Asia-Pacific index (excluding Japan) slid by 2%. Only the Hong Kong Hang Seng Index rose against the trend, standing out in the region. Gerald Gan, Chief Investment Officer of Reed Capital, pointed out that weakness in the Korean market was partly due to the poor performance of US stocks overnight, and that "the Korean market may still be in the process of speculative selling of AI-related concept stocks by leveraged retail investors, which have been a major driving force behind the index's previous advances." Foreign investors have been accelerating their exit from Asia amid a major shift in global fund flows. In the first half of this year, foreign investors pulled out of Asian stock markets at the fastest pace in at least 16 years. The strong rally driven by AI in previous periods prompted profit-taking from markets like South Korea and Taiwan and a rotation to markets with lower prices. As the US Independence Day holiday nears and trading week shortens, market focus is shifting to the upcoming US non-farm payroll data for more clues about future interest rate trends.