Business & Finance

US Tech Sell‑Offs Press TAIEX Lower Amid AI Spending Concerns

By 台北時報

The Taiwan Stock Exchange index (TAIEX) fell sharply on Friday, dropping 1,156.50 points, or 2.49 percent, to close at 45,211.83. The decline took the index below the key technical support level of about 45,300 points, which aligns with its 120‑day moving average, leaving the benchmark index more vulnerable. TAIEX futures also fell 867 points, or 1.91 percent, to 44,433, while TSMC futures lost 3.66 percent.

The sell‑off followed a 5.95 percent plunge in American depositary receipts of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) on Friday, reflecting a broader decline in U.S. technology stocks on Wall Street amid concerns over large artificial intelligence (AI) spending. The NASDAQ Composite Index fell 2.86 percent, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped 7.20 percent, and the S&P 500 fell 1.8 percent, breaching its 100‑day moving average. Intel Corp and Reddit Inc fell 29 percent, and SanDisk Corp dropped 13 percent.

Taishin Securities Investment Advisory Co. chief strategy officer Tony Huang said that market sentiment remained clouded by worries that major cloud service providers might struggle to generate comfortable sales from their massive AI infrastructure investments. He noted that tech stocks worldwide have been under heavy selling pressure since the beginning of last month, and Taiwan’s market is unlikely to be spared.

Foreign institutional investors were largely net sellers of Taiwanese shares last month, recording net sales of NT$994.3 billion (US$30.61 billion). They reduced holdings in major tech stocks such as TSMC, MediaTek Inc., and Delta Electronics Inc.

Additional uncertainty comes from the upcoming U.S. midterm elections and a planned initial public offering by AI safety and research company Anthropic PBC later this month, which have prompted large funds to pull money out of Asian markets.

Micron Technology Inc. has suspended plans for a memory chip plant in Taiwan due to a protracted labor dispute, raising questions about the fate of a major production base for AI components. Micron has halted construction of a plant in Taoyuan, according to sources.

MediaTek Inc. announced that it has secured a second customer for its customized AI accelerator for data centers and that volume production of a second‑generation chip for an existing customer is on track for early 2028. The new customer is not from China, addressing speculation that ByteDance Ltd. was the second customer.

The TAIEX’s decline was part of a global technology sell‑off that also saw the New Taiwan dollar slide to a more than 18‑month low against the U.S. dollar. The benchmark index fell 1,612.6 points to close at 43,307.54, with turnover reaching NT$928.058 billion (US$28.33 billion) and more than 1,000 listed stocks declining.

In Asia, U.S. chipmaker Nvidia reportedly ordered its data center partners to scale back work with Chinese customers, requiring cloud computing customers to sell at least 51 percent of their services to non‑Chinese companies. The new rules apply only to future contracts and not to existing agreements. Nvidia neither confirmed nor denied the report but stated that datacenters and clouds built on American chips are essential for American model and application makers to compete worldwide.