Vivold Consulting

SK Group says AI market fundamentals remain strong despite overheating equity valuations

Key Insights

SK Group's chairman says AI fundamentals remain solid, even as stock prices may correct after surging too quickly. Hardware demand, memory constraints and model-development momentum remain strong.

Stay Updated

Get the latest insights delivered to your inbox

Market sentiment vs. industry reality


SK's chief draws a line between financial exuberance and operational demand. Even if equities cool, the underlying AI infrastructure cycle especially memory and HBM continues tightening.

Why he's confident in the fundamentals


- AI models keep scaling, and memory supply remains the new bottleneck, ensuring strong pricing power.
- Corporate AI adoption curves are still in early innings, leaving significant growth runway.

Implications for the ecosystem


A correction could benefit buyers of compute and memory contracts, potentially opening room for long-term pricing reset and more sustainable deployment planning.

Related Articles

L'Oreal's OpenAI deal puts Maybelline try-on, product discovery, and ChatGPT ads in play

L'Oreal has announced a wide-ranging collaboration with OpenAI, unveiled at VivaTech 2026, that brings Maybelline's virtual makeup try-on directly into ChatGPT via L'Oreal's ModiFace AR technology. The deal spans consumer shopping tools, product discovery for brands like Lancome and Kerastase, advertising pilots (SkinCeuticals, CeraVe, Garnier), and R&D - including using OpenAI's GPT-Rosalind life-sciences model for skin-microbiome research. It lands as OpenAI reports ChatGPT at more than 900 million weekly users.

Sakana's Fugu delivers multi-agent frontier performance through one API - and pitches it as an export-control hedge

Sakana AI has launched Fugu and Fugu Ultra, a multi-agent orchestration system delivered as a single foundation model - Fugu is itself an LLM trained to route tasks across a swappable pool of the world's best models (and recursively to itself) via one OpenAI-compatible API. Sakana says Fugu Ultra matches frontier models like Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos Preview on demanding engineering, science, and reasoning benchmarks, while pitching the approach as an AI-sovereignty hedge: if one provider's access disappears, as with Anthropic's recently export-controlled models, Fugu reroutes around it. It is generally available today through subscription and pay-as-you-go tiers.

HSBC's multi-year Google Cloud deal targets 200+ AI use cases, some worth $100M+ each

HSBC has signed a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud to build and deploy AI across wealth management, financial-crime risk, and internal decision support, using Gemini models and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The bank expects more than 200 AI use cases over two years, with selected ones each potentially returning over US$100 million. It builds on a deep existing base - 600-plus AI use cases and a Google-built financial-crime system screening 1.2 billion transactions a month.