Semiconductor stocks fell across Asia and the United States on Tuesday as investors reacted to warnings about weak returns from artificial-intelligence spending and fresh evidence of technological competition from China.
Japan’s Nikkei declined 1. 8%, Tokyo Electron lost 7. 15% and SoftBank Group dropped 8. Taiwan’s market fell almost 2%, while TSMC declined by a similar amount.
The selling continued after Wall Street opened. Micron Technology fell 4. 8%, AMD lost 1.
Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan said at a Singapore conference that many investors had extreme expectations for AI without understanding the businesses they were backing. He compared the market with casino gambling and said AI companies were still losing money because of the cost of training models.
Tan said OpenAI’s annualised revenue had reached $50bn by the end of September, which he described as evidence of substantial potential but not proof of long-term profitability. He also said a significant share of AI laboratories’ enterprise revenue came from pilot projects, while companies continued searching for applications that produced a measurable return on investment.
The market pressure was compounded by developments at ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT.
CXMT president Cao Kanyu has also said the company expects to introduce a server DDR5 registered memory module using a denser 4F² cell design by the end of 2026.
That announcement challenges the established memory leaders as they work on similar structures. CXMT’s progress therefore adds a hardware-competition risk to a market already questioning whether the enormous capital committed to AI infrastructure will translate into durable profits. The immediate test is whether CXMT can deliver the proposed product at stable volume, while AI companies demonstrate that revenue from pilots and model access can support their training costs.