The world’s largest technology companies got hammered as concern about tighter U.S. restrictions on chip sales to China spurred a selloff in the industry that has led the bull market in stocks.
From the United States to Europe and Asia, chipmakers came under heavy pressure. American powerhouses Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom drove a closely watched semiconductor gauge down almost 7% — the biggest slide since 2020. Across the Atlantic, ASML Holding tumbled over 10% even after the Dutch giant reported strong orders. A plunge in Tokyo Electron led losses in the Nikkei 225 Stock Average.
Wednesday’s action reprised a recent trend in which capitalization-weighted indexes underperformed the average stock, a consequence of weakness in the megacaps that dominate them. With firms such as Apple and Microsoft each making up 7% of the S&P 500, losses are hard to offset even when most of the index’s members are up — as it happened on Wednesday.