DeepSeek Unveils Ultra-Low-Cost New Model, a “Memory Killer” ... Concerns Grow Over HBM Slowdown

[Financial News] DeepSeek’s ultra-low-cost artificial intelligence (AI) model has shaken semiconductor stocks in the United States and South Korea, following a sharp decline in Chinese AI stocks.
China’s IT publication Sina Technology described the model on the 11th as a “memory killer,” saying its API call costs had fallen to a “consumer-friendly price in the 1-yuan range” for businesses.
DeepSeek unveiled its new model, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, the previous day and claimed that it outperformed leading models such as Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, while also offering a remarkably low price.
Of its 552 billion parameters, only 8 billion to 16 billion are activated in practice. The price is as low as $0.15 per 1 million tokens during off-peak hours.
DeepSeek also said that the new model requires less high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and solid-state drive (SSD) capacity. According to DeepSeek, the key is a substantial reduction in the size of the “KV cache,” a space that temporarily stores the results of previous computations each time the AI generates a sentence. 
As a result, shares of Micron Technology and SK hynix American depositary receipts (ADRs) each fell by more than 5% at one point in the New York stock market the previous day.
The impact carried over to South Korea’s stock market on the 11th, where Samsung Electronics and SK hynix shares fell by 2% to 3%.
Following the announcement, shares of Chinese AI companies including MiniMax Group and Zhipu AI (Z.ai) plunged more than 8% on the Hong Kong stock market, while Alibaba Group also fell by more than 2%.
AI model analysis firm Artificial Analysis described this competitive landscape—where companies may struggle to survive without a clear advantage in price or performance—as a DeepSeek-driven “death zone.”
With low technical barriers to entry accelerating commoditization, the token price war is expected to continue. 


[email protected] Lee Seok-woo, International Affairs Specialist Reporter