Asian Tech Stocks Tumble After AI Leaders Call For Slowdown in AI Development

By Sherry Qin

Asian tech stocks tumbled after leaders of the world's biggest AI companies called for the industry to slow development of the technology for safety reasons.

Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei, in an essay over the weekend, called for the AI industry to slow down development of frontier AI models to provide sufficient time to ensure it is being done safely.

Meanwhile, 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."

Tech investor Softbank Group, one of OpenAI's biggest backers, slid 11% in Monday trading. Flash memory maker Kioxia Holdings fell 6.5%. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's largest contract chip maker, declined 1.2%.

South Korean chip giants SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics fell 4.5% and 2.4%, respectively, sending the country's benchmark Kospi index down 2.2%.

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 unnecessarily 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 significantly expand their chip-fabrication 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.

Write to Sherry Qin at sherry.qin@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 14, 2026 00:38 ET (04:38 GMT)