Big Short's Burry Warns AI Bubble Nearing Collapse: "800 Trillion Won Bet Is the Beginning of the End"

*Editor's Note: 'AI PRISM' (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an "artificial intelligence (AI)-based customized news recommendation and summary service" developed with support from the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six customized news items by reader type.

1. Michael Burry: "Korea's Massive Chip Investment Is the Beginning of the End"

- Key Summary: Hedge fund investor Michael Burry took short positions in Nvidia, Applied Materials, Tesla, the iShares Semiconductor ETF (exchange-traded fund) and Caterpillar, warning that a collapse of the AI bubble is imminent. Burry directly referenced the 800 trillion won investment plan under which Samsung Electronics and SK hynix said they would build four new semiconductor plants in the southwestern region, including Gwangju, arguing that "this is the beginning of the end, and now it's just a matter of time." Notably, by including Caterpillar in his short-selling targets for the first time — a stock long regarded as a leading beneficiary of the AI data center construction boom — he assessed that its price-to-sales ratio (PSR) is at its highest level in about 30 years. On the day Burry issued his warning, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) surged 3.92%, while semiconductor equipment stocks continued their rally, with AMD up 6.86%, Intel 7.23%, Applied Materials 6.00% and KLA 5.29%.

2. Non-Chip Exports Also Hit Record $57.4 Billion... Overcoming Protectionism Key to Joining "Global Top Four"

- Key Summary: With Korea's June exports surpassing $100 billion, forecasts are emerging that the country could enter the world's top four export nations. Based on World Trade Organization (WTO) figures, Korea's cumulative exports from January to April this year stood at $306.6 billion, with only four countries — China, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands — ranking ahead. With consecutive record-breaking figures in May and June, the possibility of overtaking the Netherlands during the second half has also been raised. However, the share of semiconductors in exports surged from 13% in January 2023 to 43.8% in June this year, deepening dependence on a single product category, while the DRAM export unit price fell to $60,000 per kilogram, turning downward for the first time in nine months. In addition, with the EU implementing new steel measures that cut duty-free steel import quotas to half their previous level starting July 1, and the possibility of additional U.S. tariffs remaining, export diversification has emerged as a key task.

3. Foreign Bond Investment Infrastructure to Grow "CBDC Han River"

- Key Summary: The Bank of Korea (BOK) presented a plan to expand its deposit token experiment, "Project Han River," into next-generation payment and settlement infrastructure encompassing government bond tokenization and cross-border payments. According to the plan presented by BOK Governor Shin Hyun-song at the European Central Bank (ECB) central banking forum in Sintra, Portugal, central bank digital currency, deposit tokens and government bonds would be traded on a single unified ledger to reduce settlement risk. In the first-phase experiment of Project Han River, seven banks, 81,000 users and 12,000 merchants participated, carrying out a total of 114,880 transactions. In the long term, if Korean government bonds are tokenized on this platform and linked to "Agora," an international joint settlement project, the currency exchange and settlement procedures for foreign investors could be greatly simplified.

4. [Exclusive] Beyond Nano to Angstrom-Class Within Four Years... Widening the Gap in Ultra-Fine Processes

- Key Summary: Samsung Electronics has begun developing ultra-fine processes aimed at mass-producing 1.4-nanometer (angstrom-class, one-tenth of a nanometer) chips within four years, moving beyond the current cutting-edge 2-nanometer (㎚, one-billionth of a meter) process. Under Samsung Electronics Chairman Jay Y. Lee's "gap-widening strategy," Samsung SDS has joined research on Optical Proximity Correction (OPC) — an AI-quantum computer hybrid simulation technology — establishing a group-wide collaboration system. In angstrom-class lithography processes, the number of variables increases from the previous two or three to at least 20, making computational bottlenecks inevitable, and to address this, research on hybrid algorithms combining quantum computers and GPUs (graphics processing units) is being accelerated. In addition, Nvidia is expanding cooperation with Samsung by stationing sales personnel for semiconductor process simulation solutions in Korea.

5. Anthropic's Mythos Cleared for Export After 18 Days... China Still Excluded

- Key Summary: The U.S. government fully lifted, after 18 days, the export controls it had imposed on Anthropic's latest AI models Mythos5 and Fable5 over national security concerns. Anthropic secured the removal of the controls by introducing new safeguards that block the jailbreak (bypassing AI safety mechanisms) potential of Fable5, which the U.S. government had flagged. However, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stated that "the government reserves the right to resume the controls if circumstances change or commitments are not fulfilled," maintaining government control. CNBC analyzed that the removal of the controls coincided with the rapid rise of Chinese open-source AI models, and China remains excluded from this lifting.

6. AWS Integrates All U.S. Supercomputers... Eyes Defense and Nuclear Power

- Key Summary: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been selected as the sole cloud provider for the Trump administration's national AI project, the "Genesis Mission," taking on the role of integrating 17 U.S. research institutions and private-sector capabilities into one. AWS plans to provide research institutions with cloud credits worth up to $100 million (about 155.5 billion won) and to invest up to $50 billion (about 77.79 trillion won) in expanding overall U.S. AI and supercomputing infrastructure. In the defense sector, it has extended the industrial AWS Secret Cloud (ASCI) to the defense field, enabling defense contractors to use the same security infrastructure as the Department of Defense, with Northrop Grumman as its first customer. It is also developing an AI-based small modular reactor (SMR) digital twin with the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and continuing to export related technology to the U.K. and Singapore.