"I don't know where the stock will be next month either, but the best way to preserve your wealth is to sit tight rather than buy and sell," Chey said Friday during an AI dialogue at the KCCI summer forum on the resort island of Jeju.
The remarks came a day after the benchmark KOSPI tumbled 6.37 percent to close at 6,820.60, slipping back below the 7,000 mark, as SK hynix plunged 11.5 percent amid a broad selloff in semiconductor shares triggered by the Bank of Korea's first rate hike in three and a half years.
Chey brushed aside the volatility, likening AI to a four-year-old child that would inevitably lean on memory as it matured. Demand, he said, was bound to climb at an exponential pace, a dynamic he credited for the tenfold surge in chip valuations.
Turning to strategy, the chairman cast the AI race as a matter of national security rather than mere industry, describing a widening rift between an American push for quality and a Chinese drive for price. South Korea, he warned, could hope to beat neither on those terms alone.
Instead, Chey urged Seoul to carve out a niche by laying its own infrastructure and building applications atop it, courting the neutral nations caught between the two superpowers. The country should sell computing capacity and large language models, he said, not memory chips alone.
"In the future, we must shift our strategy toward exporting intelligence rather than products," Chey said, adding that Korea's edge would lie in offering something safer, or otherwise distinct, than what Washington or Beijing could provide.
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