Nvidia’s $279 billion loss — the largest in U.S. history — drags down global chip stocks

Global shares of semiconductors and related companies fell on Wednesday after Nvidia’s stock price fell sharply in the US overnight.

In the U.S., chipmaker Nvidia fell more than 9% in regular trading, sending semiconductor stocks lower amid a selloff on Wall Street. Economic data released on Tuesday rekindled nerves about the health of the U.S. economy. Nvidia shares continued to slide in post-market trading on Tuesday, falling 2%, after Bloomberg reported that the company had received a subpoena from the Justice Department as part of an antitrust investigation.

About $279 billion in value was wiped off Nvidia on Tuesday, in the biggest one-day market cap drop for a U.S. stock in history. The previous record was held by Facebook parent Meta, which suffered a $232 billion drop in value in a single day in February 2022.

Nvidia’s value chain extends to South Korea, namely memory chip maker SK Hynix and conglomerate Samsung Electronics.

Shares of Samsung closed down 3.45%, while SK Hynix, which supplies high-bandwidth memory chips to Nvidia, fell 8%.

Tokyo Electron fell 8.5%, while semiconductor test equipment supplier Advantest lost nearly 8%.

Japanese investment company SoftBank Group, which has a stake in chip designer Arm, fell 7.7%.

Contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company fell more than 5%. TSMC makes Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units that power large language models — machine learning programs that can recognize and generate text.

Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry — known internationally as Foxconn — lost nearly 3 percent. It has a strategic partnership with Nvidia.

Selling in Asia trickled down to European semiconductor stocks. Shares of ASML, which makes critical equipment for the production of advanced chips, fell 5% in early trading. Other European names such as ASMI, Be Semiconductor and Infineon were all lower.