Chip stocks pulled back on Thursday as excitement about Donald Trump's Stargate Project faded. ARM Holdings fell 7%; Direxion Daily Semiconductors Bull 3x Shares fell over 5%; Micron Technology, ASML fell over 3%; Nvidia fell around 2%.
The losses could just be investors taking profit after news of the $500 billion funding drive sparked a broad rally on Wednesday -- but it might also reflect that at this point, the market might have more questions than answers.
Elsewhere, SK Hynix shares closed 2.7% lower Thursday after the South Korean memory-chip supplier posted a record profit but warned of faltering demand this year.
U.S.-listed AI-related stocks had surged on Wednesday after Trump unveiled Stargate, a joint venture that's set to invest $500 billion in data centers over the next four years.
SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle CTO and executive chairman Larry Ellison, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will all be involved with the project. But as Barron's noted Thursday, the details remain sparse.
The biggest question is where the money will come from -- SoftBank and Oracle both have more debt than cash, and OpenAI is a start-up that's still reliant on its investors. That may leave MGX, a new AI investment firm from the United Arab Emirates that is a financing partner in the joint venture, shouldering much of the burden. The firm is backed by the U.A.E.'s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, which has about $300 billion in assets under management.
Altman and key Trump ally Elon Musk have already traded barbs about Stargate. Musk said in a post on X that he had it "on good authority" that SoftBank had secured less than $10 billion in funding, before Altman called the Tesla CEO "wrong" in a post of his own defending the project.
Perhaps that sense of uncertainty is what was weighing on Oracle and other big AI names Thursday.
Comments