“All ants are dying.”

So read the caption on a picture of Lewis Carroll’s Alice wielding a hammer against helpless emmets and pismires. The image went viral Tuesday among South Korea’s teeming hordes of retail investors.

Known affectionately (and semi-pejoratively) as “ants,” that crowd was scattered by a catastrophic first-day rout for shares of code tutor–turned–neocloud Elice, which is “Alice” in ‘Murican. The retail slice of Elice’s debut was 400x oversubscribed.

Among other places, South Korea’s ants congregate in the brokerage corner of financial services super-app Toss, where the Alice meme originated.

As a quick aside, Toss’s parent company Viva Republica tossed (sorry) a prospective US listing for the popular fintech over the summer amid friction with South Korean officials. As one local source put it, the government wasn’t terribly excited about “a large unicorn that grew its business in Korea skipping the domestic capital market and listing on an overseas exchange first.”

In addition to domestic political concerns, Viva Republica reportedly wanted more time to assess “market conditions” in the interest of ensuring that any listing for Toss would result in “recognition of an appropriate corporate value.”

Notwithstanding an epic windfall for its three founders (one of whose stakes in the company was worth around $250 million based on the pre-debut, finalized IPO price of KRW90,500 per share), and setting aside this could’ve been a “now or never” opportunity given rapidly deteriorating sentiment, Elice’s management team might be wondering if they too would’ve been better served to shelve their IPO plan. Because by the close on October 20, the same shares they sold at KRW90,500 were going for just KRW61,500.

As the figure shows, this was the worst South Korean debut among companies raising more than $100 million.

In addition to being a very bad look for South Korean equities coming as it does on the heels of the Kospi’s worst week since the GFC (and a similarly harrowing decline for the Kosdaq), this is salt on a snail for the neocloud space, which is beset by renewed concerns around the viability of CoreWeave’s leveraged business model.

Elice’s top-line growth numbers are stratospheric, where that means its sales tripled during the first six months of the most recent fiscal year and should nearly double for the full year. They’re also profitable now, apparently. They do borrow — and meaningfully at that — but on a quick glance, the balance sheet isn’t indicative of what I’ll gently call a “CoreWeave-sized” leverage issue.

The nuance doesn’t matter right now, though. Not when sentiment’s this poor. CoreWeave on Monday took out the July lows to trade at a new “since May 2025” nadir, and the financial media pile-on constitutes a veritable shark feeding frenzy. On Tuesday morning, for example, FTAlphaville wondered, “Is CoreWeave the Silicon Valley Bank of 2026?” (As an old mentor once told me: “If you think a title might get us in trouble, just pose it as a question.”)

Elice’s “flameout,” as Bloomberg described Tuesday’s debacle in South Korea, adds to the deluge of bad press, which now includes rumblings of a local regulatory probe into Australia’s Firmus. (The Nvidia-backed startup scrapped its own IPO plans at the last minute this month in what one local fund manager called a “reality check for the AI investment boom.”)

Meanwhile, Nscale made more headlines on Monday, when Bloomberg said the UK-based neocloud may be close to another deal with Anthropic worth up to $45 billion. Last week, Nscale was in the news for the wrong reasons, as Microsoft pulled the plug on a data center partnership with the company. Like seemingly everything else in the increasingly self-referential, AI deal Venn diagram, Nscale’s backed by Nvidia. It too is looking to go public, and as soon as this month.

If you can’t keep up with all of this, you’re not alone and you shouldn’t feel bad. Because by virtue of being outside the bubble, you likely have a more sober perspective compared to the people and firms stuck inside it. If you ask me — and you implicitly did just by being here — we’re at the beginning of what’ll be remembered as the first real shakeout in the AI trade.

That’s certainly not to say this is “it,” so to speak. This isn’t “the top” in any grand sense. But Elice’s Tuesday collapse was yet another canary. And the finch body count’s rising quickly in this particular coal mine.