Asian chip stocks tumbled on Friday after Nvidia’s sharp overnight decline dragged the sector lower, despite the U.S. tech giant posting stronger-than-expected earnings and a bullish sales outlook.
Japan’s SoftBank led the losses, sinking more than 10% in Tokyo. The conglomerate no longer holds Nvidia shares but still owns Arm, the British chip architecture firm whose designs are widely used in Nvidia’s processors. SoftBank is also tied to several large-scale AI ventures, including the $500 billion Stargate data center project in the U.S., making it sensitive to sentiment around AI demand.
In South Korea, SK Hynix, Nvidia’s top supplier of high-bandwidth memory, fell nearly 10%, while Samsung Electronics, another major Nvidia memory partner, dropped more than 5%.
Taiwan’s semiconductor giants also slid. TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker and producer of most Nvidia GPU designs, fell over 4%, and Hon Hai Precision (Foxconn) dipped around 4% amid concerns about slowing AI hardware spending.
Smaller component and equipment makers across Asia were swept into the decline. Japan’s Renesas Electronics slid 2.3%, Tokyo Electron dropped 5.32%, and Lasertec fell more than 3.5%.
The selloff followed Nvidia’s more than 3% drop in the U.S. on Thursday, a move that surprised investors after the company beat expectations and raised its fourth-quarter sales forecast. Analysts said the slide reflected broader market volatility rather than concerns about Nvidia’s fundamentals.
