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Asian stocks fell on Friday and US markets were set to open lower as a tech sell-off gathered pace.
Japan’s exporter-heavy Nikkei 225 tumbled as much as 5 per cent, led by a nearly 14 per cent slide in SoftBank shares following a report that OpenAI was considering delaying its IPO to next year. Masayoshi Son’s conglomerate holds a stake of about 13 per cent in the ChatGPT maker through its Vision Fund.
In South Korea the Kospi fell 8 per cent, triggering a circuit breaker, after Samsung and SK Hynix both tumbled about 9 per cent. The index is on course for its worst week since early March, shortly after the US-Iran war began.
Elsewhere in Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index and the Shanghai Composite both retreated about 2 per cent.
Wall Street is set to open lower, with futures contracts tracking the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 down 1.7 per cent. The broader S&P 500 is expected to start 0.8 per cent lower.
“I think this is investors rethinking inflation, rate hikes and global volatility,” said Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief Asia-Pacific economist at Natixis.
The declines come at the end of a volatile week for global markets, which are increasingly influenced by expectations of chip and memory demand by AI hyperscalers and labs.
Sentiment was also dented 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.
The increases spooked investors, sending Apple shares down 6.1 per cent and wiping more than $260bn off its market value on Thursday. The decline was the company’s biggest one-day slide since early April last year, when US President Donald Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs.
Apple’s sell-off was mirrored by chipmaker Micron’s rise of about 16 per cent after the memory chipmaker reported a near 15-fold surge in quarterly profit.
Apple’s price rise is evidence of how consumer technology companies are being affected by the surge in demand for memory and storage from data centres and the global AI infrastructure build-out, which is leading them to pass on some additional cost to shoppers.
Meanwhile OpenAI was considering delaying its mammoth initial public offering until 2027, The New York Times reported, in a potential sign of growing wariness on the state of global equity markets and investor demand for more AI exposure.
SoftBank, which is among OpenAI’s largest backers, was the second biggest contributor to the Nikkei 225’s fall after memory company Kioxia sank by about 10 per cent.
The price of Brent crude fell 1.7 per cent to around $74 per barrel amid an interim US-Iran deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, initially closed after the US-Israeli attacks on the Islamic republic.
Other assets also fell on Friday, with gold shedding 0.7 per cent to just under $4,000 an ounce and bitcoin falling below $60,000 — less than half its record high of above $126,000.
