Is This the End of the AI Stock Rally?

There was a shocking event during the Lunar New Year holiday.
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI similar to ChatGPT, sent the U.S. market crashing.
NVIDIA's stock price, which had only been soaring skyward, plunged 17%, semiconductor company Broadcom fell 17%, and Micron Technology, a company like Korea's SK hynix, also plunged 11%.
Why did this happen?
The reason is that developing this generative AI model, DeepSeek, cost about 5.6 million dollars, or about 8 billion won in Korean currency, yet compared to ChatGPT developed by the U.S. company OpenAI, in which trillions of won had been invested, there was no big difference in performance.
The standing of the U.S., which had led the global artificial intelligence market with overwhelming AI technology, plummeted because of DeepSeek.
What surprised the market even more was that the NVIDIA GPUs used to develop DeepSeek were low-cost models made for export to China.
As reactions emerged that there was no need to use NVIDIA's high-end models for AI development, NVIDIA recorded its largest-ever drop.
And the stock prices of companies linked to NVIDIA fell as well.
Adding another reason, because DeepSeek was developed with NVIDIA's low-cost chips, the U.S. government may impose additional sanctions on NVIDIA's exports to China in the future.
For NVIDIA, bad news really hit hard.
Conversely, as DeepSeek showed that AI can be built even with low-cost models, the stock price of Salesforce, a company that brings AI models to its clients, rose 4%, and Meta's stock rose 2%.
And Apple, a flagship U.S. company, rose 3% and regained the No. 1 spot in market capitalization.
Apple, which had been assessed as a latecomer in AI, actually received good news thanks to China's DeepSeek, which no one had anticipated.
The reason, as mentioned, is that AI development may no longer require paying NVIDIA a lot of money.
That's because Apple is not a company that makes AI chips. Afterward, the market did rebound as analyses emerged that there was still much to verify about DeepSeek.
However, the shock of DeepSeek does not look likely to disappear easily.
If the GPUs used in DeepSeek or its performance turn out to be fake news that differs from the facts, this situation will end as a mere happening, but judging by the news announced so far, there is no sign of that yet.
Assuming it is true, NVIDIA and related companies are highly likely to have difficulty rising as easily as before for the time being.
Investors in the market hate uncertainty the most.
NVIDIA and its affiliated chipmakers need to show investors that they are the best by announcing new technologies or other news that can surpass this.
Unless we assume that bad news about DeepSeek keeps coming out, it doesn't seem bad to view this point as a test of whether these companies can grow again.
Korea's Samsung Electronics hasn't risen much so far, so the impact may not be large, but companies like SK hynix, whose stock prices have risen a lot on AI chip development, should keep a close eye on DeepSeek-related articles going forward.
If another low-development-cost AI like DeepSeek emerges, the market may question for a while whether ever-higher-performance chips are still needed.