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Memory stocks and chipmakers sold off again on Friday, although a recovery in the rest of the US stock market put Wall Street on track to break a four-day losing streak.
After a storming rally for much of this year, memory and semiconductor stocks have been dragged lower in recent sessions amid investor fears that the rally has run too far. Sandisk and Western Digital were down about 8 per cent and 11 per cent respectively on Friday.
US chip giant Micron — which soared 15 per cent on Thursday after smashing through analysts’ profit and revenue expectations in quarterly earnings — fell 3.4 per cent.
A strong performance by software stocks buoyed the broader Nasdaq Composite, which was 0.4 per cent higher around lunchtime in New York after rebounding from sharp opening losses. The S&P 500 also rose 0.4 per cent, after both indices declined every previous day this week.
“I see a lot of clients saying, ‘we made good profits with tech, the Fed is more hawkish, there’s a bit of frothiness going on, let’s take profits’,” said Emmanuel Cau, head of European equities strategy at Barclays. “There’s a suspicion that we are close to the peak of the AI narrative.”
Bank of America said its clients had been net sellers of US equities in the past week for the first time since March, in the early stages of the US-Iran war. Investors overall dumped more than $8bn of US stocks this week, they said, following a record inflow to the market the week before.
Sentiment was also dented on Thursday by Apple announcing price rises of about 20 per cent for MacBooks and iPads, one of the broadest increases in its history, citing the “unprecedented challenge” of rising memory prices.
Following the announcement on Thursday, Apple shares fell 6.1 per cent, wiping more than $260bn off its market value. The stock was flat on Friday.
“Here’s a real-life data point of a large corporate that is saying they need to pass on prices to preserve their margin,” said Rhynhardt Roodt, chief investment officer for equities at Ninety One, referring to Apple’s price rises. “The market is worried . . . can that be absorbed by the end consumer?”
Adding to the worries was a report from the New York Times that OpenAI was considering delaying its mammoth IPO until 2027.
Market sentiment around AI has also been affected by pricing data that suggests demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units, the workhorses of the AI boom, may be falling. Spot pricing for Nvidia’s H100 chips has fallen 40 per cent from a peak in May, according to computing pricing tracker Ornn.
The Stoxx Europe 600 closed 0.7 per cent lower, with the technology sub-index falling 0.9 per cent.
In South Korea, the Kospi index — which has doubled in 2026 as investors piled into chip and memory stocks — fell as much as 9 per cent, triggering a halt in trading, before closing down 5.8 per cent.
Japan’s exporter-heavy Nikkei 225 tumbled as much as 5 per cent before closing 4.2 per cent lower, led by a nearly 14 per cent slide in SoftBank shares. Masayoshi Son’s conglomerate holds a stake of about 13 per cent in OpenAI through its Vision Fund.
Additional reporting by Tim Bradshaw
Source:
www.ft.com
