Global semiconductor and related stocks fell on Wednesday after Nvidia shares plunged overnight in the US.
In the U.S., shares of chipmaker Nvidia Inc. plunged more than 9% in regular trading, leading semiconductor stocks lower amid selling pressure on Wall Street. Economic data released on Tuesday resurfaced concerns about the health of the U.S. economy. Nvidia shares continued to fall after the close on Tuesday, dropping 2% after Bloomberg reported that the company had received a subpoena from the Department of Justice as part of an antitrust investigation.
Nvidia’s market capitalization fell by about $279 billion on Tuesday, the largest one-day market capitalization drop ever for a U.S. stock. The previous record was held by Facebook parent company Meta, which saw its market capitalization fall by $232 billion in one day in February 2022.
Nvidia’s value chain stretches all the way to South Korea, specifically memory chip maker SK Hynix and conglomerate Samsung Electronics.
Samsung shares closed down 3.45%, while SK Hynix, which supplies high-bandwidth memory chips to Nvidia, fell 8%.
Tokyo Electron fell 8.5%, while semiconductor testing equipment maker Advantest also fell about 8%.
Shares in SoftBank Group, the Japanese investment holding company that owns shares in semiconductor design company Arm, fell 7.7%.
Contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) fell more than 5%. TSMC makes Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units that run large language models, machine learning programs that can recognize and generate text.
Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd., known internationally as Foxconn, fell nearly 3%. The company has a strategic partnership with Nvidia.
The sell-off in Asia spilled over into European semiconductor stocks. ASML, which makes equipment essential to making advanced chips, lost 5% at the open. Other European stocks including ASMI, Be Semiconductor and Infineon all fell.