Leading chipmaker, Nvidia, lost a whopping $279 billion in market value on Tuesday, the largest one-time loss in US stock history, after Bloomberg reported that the company had received a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice as part of an antitrust investigation.
During regular trading on Wall Street, the tech giant saw its stock value drop by over 9%, while its shares continued to slide another 2% in post-market trading.
Tech stocks around the world took a major hit on Wednesday after the first drop in Nvidia’s stock yesterday triggering a broader sell-off in semiconductor stocks and causing global semiconductor stocks also to plummet.
In Asian markets, SK Hynic, which supplies high bandwidth memory chips to Nvidia, dropped 8%, while Samsung shares closed 3.45% lower.
In Japan, Tokyo Electron dropped 6.8%, while semiconductor testing equipment supplier Advantest dropped nearly 8%. SoftBank Group, a Japanese investment holding company, fell 7.7%.
Nvidia’s high-performance, graphics-processing-units manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), fell by more than 5%. Another Taiwan-based partner of Nvidia, Hon Hai Precision Industry lost 3% of its value.
In the US, the S&P 500 index dropped more than 2% on Tuesday, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell by over 3% following Nvidia’s massive drop. However, Nvidia’s shares are still worth nine times what they were in November 2022, when the launch of ChatGPT sparked a surge in demand for its AI-related chips.
Other major US tech companies, including Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft, also saw their shares tumble on Tuesday.
The decline in both US and Asian markets also caused UK shares to fall. The FTSE 100 index, which includes the largest companies on the London Stock Exchange, fell by 0.76% in early trading, with major European markets also down.