AI-linked Asian stocks fell today as investors reassessed the value of companies driving the artificial intelligence revolution. Several leading AI figures called for a slowdown in development for safety reasons, which led to a drop in shares. South Korea's KOSPI index fell by 3.7%, while chipmaker SK Hynix slumped by 5.75%. SoftBank, a major AI investor, fell by as much as 13% in Tokyo after OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman said the ChatGPT-maker won't go public this year. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company dropped by 1.2% in Taipei.
Traders' optimism about AI took a hit after the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, appealed for the AI industry to slow down. Amodei warned that building AI too fast is reckless and could cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage by taking over the entire internet. Although Amodei's claims have been disputed by some AI experts, investors are pricing in a slowdown to AI development, which could make it harder for the industry to pay for its rapid rollout of data centres.
Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote, noted a sour mood in the markets this morning. She explained that if the AI race slows materially, the key question becomes who will pay for all that infrastructure. The leases, debt, and power commitments remain even if expected compute demand and revenue growth slow. This could bring credit risk increasingly into the AI story, particularly for highly leveraged data-centre operators and lenders exposed to projects built on aggressive assumptions about future AI demand, at a time when interest rates and borrowing costs are expected to rise.
The anticipated value of AI developer OpenAI has dropped over the weekend, following the call for a slowdown in the industry. OpenAI is currently a private company, but broker IG are running a contract where traders can bet on the company's value. Tony Sycamore, market analyst at IG, reports that IG's OpenAI Pre IPO market-cap contract has fallen back to $1.57 trillion on the news, a pullback of about $70 billion from that high. Sam Altman said a stock market float this year would be ill-advised.
