Chip Stocks Tumble After AI Leaders Call for Slowdown in Development — Update

By Sherry Qin, Adria Calatayud and Joe Stonor

U.S. chip stocks followed European and Asian peers lower premarket after leaders of the world's biggest artificial intelligence companies called for the industry to slow development of the technology for safety reasons.

Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei, writing in a weekend essay, said the AI industry should avoid a race to the bottom and take the necessary time to ensure frontier models were being developed responsibly.

In an interview with Fortune, Sam Altman said OpenAI likely wouldn't go public this year given all the safety concerns. "I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don't feel pressure on that."

In response, chip stocks fell sharply in premarket trade. Marvell Technology shed close to 8%, while Intel, Micron Technology and Sandisk all dropped around 6%. Broadcom fell 3.9% and Nvidia--the world's most valuable company--lost 2.5%. Nasdaq futures fell 1.6%.

In Europe, Dutch semiconductor-equipment supplier ASML Holding fell 6%, putting it on track to shed around 33.6 billion euros ($38.98 billion) in market value. Smaller peers ASM International and BE Semiconductor Industries dropped 10% and 8.2%, respectively.

European chip makers Infineon Technologies and STMicroelectronics were down 8.3% and 6.2%, respectively. Companies linked to the build-out of AI infrastructure slid, with Siemens Energy--which makes turbines used to power data centers--losing 8.2%. Other European companies in the semiconductor supply chain also fell sharply. France's Soitec and Germany's Aixtron led declines on the Stoxx Europe 600 index.

In Asia, tech investor Softbank Group, one of OpenAI's biggest backers, closed 11% lower Monday. Flash memory maker Kioxia Holdings fell 6.4%. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's largest contract chip maker, declined 1.2%.

South Korean chip giants SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics fell 6.4% and 4.1%, respectively, sending the country's benchmark Kospi index down 3.3%.

Asia's tech selloff looks like a knee-jerk reaction to the headline, analysts said.

"AI valuations assume not only strong demand but also a relentless pace of model development," said Charu Chanana, chief investment strategist at Saxo Markets. With oil prices and bond yields elevated amid heightened Middle East tensions, investors already have less tolerance for any challenges to those expectations, she added.

However, slowing the pace of development for the next frontier model won't necessarily slow down the AI investment cycle.

"The next leg of AI demand may depend less on how often new models are trained, and more on how intensively they are used," said Tiger Brokers market strategist James Ooi. Also, the next phase of AI compute demand, which may be largely driven by inference and agentic workloads, could continue to support hardware and infrastructure providers.

Still, analysts have issued warnings about AI hardware makers' accelerating production expansion plans. Samsung and SK Hynix have planned to invest more than $500 billion in a new chip-making hub in South Korea to expand their manufacturing capacity. In Japan, Kioxia and Sandisk are investing more than $31 billion to drive the large-scale supply of flash memory chips.

"Memory, including high-bandwidth memory, could face an oversupply risk if new capacity arrives before demand," Chanana said.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

Write to Sherry Qin at sherry.qin@wsj.com, to Adria Calatayud at adria.calatayud@wsj.com and to Joe Stonor at josephmichael.stonor@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 14, 2026 09:01 ET (13:01 GMT)