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US tech stocks are on course for the worst week since President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs rocked global financial markets in April, as concerns about elevated valuations fuelled a $900bn rout in companies linked to the artificial intelligence boom.
The market value of eight of the most valuable AI-related stocks — including Nvidia, Meta, Palantir and Oracle — has fallen by $911bn since the end of last week.
Trading on Friday morning deepened tech investors’ losses for the week, with Nvidia falling 2.6 per cent in early trading. Other big tech companies whose share prices declined this week included Microsoft, Amazon and Broadcom.
The declines have left the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite on course for a weekly loss of 4 per cent, its worst five-day run since the index fell 10 per cent after Trump launched his trade war with a flurry of tariff announcements in April.
Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, has fallen the most in dollar terms over the week, losing more than $430bn in market capitalisation.
Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang told the Financial Times this week that he expected China was ultimately “going to win the AI race” against the US.
He subsequently tried to row back on the comments, saying that China was “nanoseconds behind America in AI”, but the remarks came as the Silicon Valley chipmaker’s hopes were waning that the US government would allow it to sell a version of its latest Blackwell AI processor to Chinese customers.
Chinese competitors are already narrowing the technical lead held by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Anthropic, which are all making huge investments in AI infrastructure, much of it based on Nvidia’s chips.
This week’s debut of Beijing-based Moonshot AI’s new Kimi K2 Thinking model was hailed as the latest breakthrough by Chinese developers, with reports suggesting it cost less than $5mn to train.
“Is this another DeepSeek moment?” Thomas Wolf, co-founder of AI developer platform Hugging Face, said in a social media post about Kimi. The release of DeepSeek’s low-cost R1 model sparked a Wall Street panic in January that wiped $589bn from Nvidia’s market value in a single day.
Comments this week by OpenAI’s finance chief Sarah Friar that the $500bn AI group might look to the US government to provide a funding “backstop” also triggered speculation about its finances.
OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman sought to calm anxiety in a social media post on Thursday, saying: “We do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI data centres.”
He predicted that OpenAI’s revenues would “grow to hundreds of billion[s] by 2030”, though that figure may fall below its AI infrastructure commitments, which he said totalled $1.4tn over the next eight years.