People walk past a logo of Samsung Electronics in Seoul on July 7, 2022. South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. posted its best April-June profit since 2018 on Thursday, helped by strong sales of memory chips to server customers even as demand from inflation-hit smartphone makers slowed.
Jung Yoon-ji | AFP | Getty Images
Semiconductor and semiconductor-related stocks fell in Asia on Wednesday morning, following a sharp drop in Nvidia's U.S. share price overnight.
In the United States, chipmaker Nvidia Shares of Nvidia Corp. fell more than 9% in regular trading, dragging down semiconductor stocks amid a heavy sell-off on Wall Street. Economic data released Tuesday resurfaced concerns about the health of the U.S. economy. Nvidia shares continued to slide in after-market trading Tuesday, falling 2%, after Bloomberg reported that the company had been subpoenaed by the Justice Department as part of an antitrust investigation.
Nvidia's value chain extends to South Korea, specifically memory chip maker SK Hynix and electronics conglomerate Samsung.
Samsung shares fell 2.6%, while SK Hynix fell more than 6%, pulling the broader Kospi down 2.5%. The small-cap Kosdaq fell 3%. SK Hynix supplies high-bandwidth memory chips to Nvidia, which are used in artificial intelligence chips.
tokyo electron It fell 7%, while the semiconductor test equipment supplier's stock fell. Adventist It decreased by more than 8%.
Japanese Investment Holding Company SoftBank Groupwhich owns a stake in the chip design company. armIt decreased by 6%.
Contract chip manufacturing company Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Shares of TSMC fell 4.3%. TSMC makes high-performance graphics processing units for Nvidia that run large language models — machine-learning programs that can recognize and generate text.
Taiwan Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. – Internationally known as Foxconn – lost 5%. It has a strategic partnership with Nvidia.
On Tuesday in the US, Nvidia lost $279 billion in market value.
—CNBC's Lim Hui Jie contributed to this report.
