Cphoto | Future publication | Getty Images
Asian semiconductor and related stocks fell on Wednesday morning, following a sharp decline in Nvidia’s share price in the US.
In the US, chip maker Nvidia fell more than 9% in regular trading, sending semiconductor stocks lower amid a sell-off on Wall Street. Economic data released Tuesday revived jitters about the health of the U.S. economy. Nvidia shares continued to fall in after-hours trading on Tuesday, then fell 2% Bloomberg reports this that the company has received a subpoena from the Department of Justice as part of an antitrust investigation.
Nvidia’s value chain extends to South Korea, namely memory chip maker SK Hynix and conglomerate Samsung Electronics.
Shares of Samsung fell 2.6%, while SK Hynix fell more than 6%, sending the broader Kospi index down 2.5%. The small-cap Kosdaq fell 3%. SK Hynix supplies high-bandwidth memory chips to Nvidia, which are used in AI chipsets.
Other direct suppliers to Nvidia like it Tokyo Electron fell 7%, while semiconductor test equipment supplier Advantage lost more than 8%.
Japanese investment holding company SoftBank Groupthat has an interest in chip designer Armdecreased by 6%.
Contract chip manufacturer Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing company fell by 4.3%. TSMC produces Nvidia’s powerful graphics processing units that power large language models: machine learning programs that can recognize and generate text.
That of Taiwan Hon Hai Precision Industry – known internationally as Foxconn – lost 5%. It has a strategic partnership with Nvidia.
On Tuesday in the United States, Nvidia wiped out $279 billion in market capitalization.
—CNBC’s Lim Hui Jie contributed to this report.