Semiconductor stocks led a broad technology selloff on Wednesday. The semiconductor basket tracked by this site fell 4.5 percent on the day and is now down 10.88 percent on the week. Nvidia fell 3.16 percent to $221.30, Broadcom fell 3.1 percent, Meta fell 3.27 percent, and the wider technology sector fell 2.98 percent. The Nasdaq 100 lost 2.02 percent while the Dow Jones was nearly flat, down 0.09 percent, a split that marks the move as a growth and chip story rather than a general market break. Apple was the only megacap to rise, up 0.5 percent.
The trigger was inflation. US consumer prices rose 3.7 percent in September from a year earlier, above the 3.6 percent forecast, with the monthly gain of 0.6 percent the largest in five months and core inflation at 2.6 percent, also a tenth above expectations, according to the Labor Department figures reported across outlets. Hotter inflation raises the odds of further Federal Reserve tightening, and higher rates fall hardest on companies whose valuations rest on earnings years away and on projects financed with borrowed money.
That second channel is what made chips fall further than the index. Reporting on the session tied the selling to stress in AI infrastructure credit, including CoreWeave, whose borrowing costs have risen as investors question how much more debt-funded capacity the market will finance, and to reports of softer than expected revenue at the large AI labs. AMD fell 5.7 percent, its sharpest drop since August, and server and data center names fell further still in the same session.
The demand side told a different story hours later. TSMC reported a sixth straight record quarterly profit overnight, up 68.7 percent from a year earlier, on AI chip demand that continues to outrun supply (see today’s TSMC story). The juxtaposition is the day’s central fact: orders for AI silicon are not weakening, but the cost of the capital that turns those orders into data centers is rising, and equity markets are now pricing the financing layer of the AI trade separately from the silicon layer.