Technology stocks tumbled on Tuesday, dragged down by fears of the hefty bills for the build-out of artificial intelligence systems and concerns over intensifying competition from China in memory chips — a critical component of A.I. long dominated by South Korea and its peers.
South Korea’s benchmark Kospi index plunged more than 10 percent on Tuesday, at one point triggering a temporary trading halt. Benchmark indexes in Japan and Taiwan both fell around 4 percent. Stocks in China fell over 2 percent.
Futures for the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell about 1 percent. In early trading in Europe, the region’s tech giants, like ASML of the Netherlands, Infineon of Germany and STMicroelectronics of Switzerland all fell about 2 percent.
The latest A.I.-related market tremor began on Monday, when the shares of China’s leading memory chipmaker, ChangXin Memory Technologies, began trading after a blockbuster initial public offering. The company’s stock soared nearly 500 percent on its market debut, quickly making it the most valuable company on the Shanghai exchange. It slipped 4 percent on Tuesday.
The listing sparked widespread fears that intensifying industry competition could threaten rival global memory chipmakers in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the United States.
The declines began as soon as stocks opened on Tuesday, with A.I. and semiconductor stocks the hardest hit. Japanese flash memory maker Kioxia fell more than 18 percent. South Korean semiconductor giant Samsung Electronics dropped about 13 percent.
Asian markets have been trending downward since late June, weighed down by recurring concerns over the sustainability of this year’s A.I. rally.
The staggering scale of spending required to keep up in the global A.I. race was highlighted this week by OpenAI, the parent of ChatGPT, nearing a deal to lease a $500 billion data center in Ohio, supported by $250 billion in financial backing from the chip-making giant Nvidia. Last week, earnings reports by Tesla and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, shook the markets as they revealed their own enormous A.I. spending needs.
On Monday, the Chinese start-up Moonshot publicly released the details of its latest A.I. model, adding to investor concerns about an A.I. arms race between China and the United States.
The latest market turmoil is an unwelcome turn for a region where the A.I. boom has served as a rare economic bright spot. In markets like South Korea and Taiwan, rising chip exports and soaring A.I. valuations have masked broader weakness across their domestic economies, which remain heavily dependent on energy imports from the Middle East.
The U.S. tech giants Microsoft and Meta are scheduled to report earnings Wednesday, alongside South Korea semiconductor giant SK Hynix. On Thursday, Apple and Amazon report earnings, as does Samsung Electronics.
