‘Could Resonate Globally’: Korea Sparks Market Chaos With ‘AI Tax’ Threat

Korean markets were under pressure overnight after politicians floated the idea of tapping AI profits. 

Bloomberg reports that a top South Korean policymaker said the nation should pay citizens a ‘dividend’ using taxes on AI profits, with the obvious read through to Samsung and SK Hynix. 

The comments in a Facebook post by presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom fueled sharp swings in Korean stocks on Tuesday as investors struggled to parse the scope of the proposals.

“Excess profits in the AI era are, by nature, concentrated,” Kim wrote.

Memory companies, core engineers and asset holders in Seoul are highly likely to receive substantial benefits, while much of the middle class may experience only indirect effects, he said.

The size of any potential dividend, and other details on how Kim’s proposals might be implemented, weren’t immediately clear.

Still, investors took notice.

“After some 80% gain this year, the market was getting sensitive to any news that can trigger investor jitters,” said Kim Dojoon, chief investment officer at Zian Investment Management.

“Policy chief Kim’s post was easy to draw misunderstanding from the market at such a moment.”

The benchmark KOSPI initially plunged as much as 5.1% (more than $300 billion in market cap)…

The weakness spread into Europe and is dragging down Nasdaq futures in the pre-market…

But, as the impact of his statement spread across markets, damage control quickly hit with the influential policy adviser clarifying he wanted to tap “excess tax revenue” generated from the AI boom, rather than roll out a new windfall levy on corporate profits.

An official at the president’s office told Bloomberg News that Kim’s remarks represented his personal opinion and weren’t the subject of formal discussions.

However, the episode is the latest example of politicians calling attention to how the advent of AI risks widening the gap between the haves and have-nots.

In South Korea, that concern has surfaced in public calls for industry leaders to share more of the spoils of the global AI infrastructure rollout.

While Kim’s ideas are preliminary, if they were to be rolled out it would mark one of the first concerted government efforts to share the proceeds of the boom.

As Goldman’s One-Delta desk-head, Rich Privorotsky, noted this morning, this feels like a theme that could resonate globally given the extreme concentration of AI earnings and the fact that the benefits skew so disproportionately to mega cap winners. 

The  speed of fast money/retail chasing semis, plus the proliferation of 2x/3x levered structures in Korea and the US, gives me pause about the fragility building into this rally but obviously the core of thesis, ‘we need more tokens’ remains unshaken.