Semiconductor Selloff Spreads From Wall Street to Asia, Nikkei Falls More Than 4 Percent

A retreat from the companies that led global equities higher through the first half of 2026 accelerated on Friday. A decline in United States chip and memory shares spread into Asian trading and pulled major benchmarks sharply lower.

Japan's Nikkei 225 fell as much as 4 percent, according to reporting from Tokyo. The technology investor SoftBank dropped around 9 percent and the chip-equipment maker Advantest fell by a similar margin. The memory manufacturer Kioxia declined close to 16 percent in a single session, extending a slide that has removed roughly 44 percent of its value in a month. The Israeli financial outlet Globes reported that the negative sentiment affecting chip shares in the United States reached exchanges across the East, with South Korea's market closed for a local holiday.

The Financial Times described the move as investors pulling away from the shares that had led markets higher this year, a rotation out of richly valued stocks rather than a broad economic alarm. Netflix added to the caution, falling more than 8 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday. Its revenue and earnings came in roughly in line with estimates, but its forecast for the current quarter disappointed. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's outlook, delivered a day earlier, failed to reassure investors who have grown more skeptical about how quickly artificial-intelligence spending will convert into profit.

The pullback matters because a handful of chip and platform companies now account for an outsized share of index gains, so a repricing of their earnings assumptions moves entire markets. From a sound-money view, the episode illustrates how years of cheap credit concentrate capital into a narrow set of assets whose valuations depend on continued expectations of abundant liquidity. When those expectations soften, the correction is fast and broad.