Nvidia Falls 5% and Cedes Most-Valuable Crown to Apple as AI Financing Fears Hit Global Chip Stocks

The two-year rise in artificial-intelligence stocks reversed sharply this week. Nvidia fell about 5% on Monday, July 27, and Apple replaced it as the world's most valuable company, as Israeli financial outlet Globes reported that the decline across the semiconductor sector unsettled markets worldwide. Apple's market value approached $5 trillion after a gain of roughly 1%, while Nvidia settled near $4.77 trillion, according to CNBC.

The trigger was a report, first carried by the Wall Street Journal, that Nvidia is in talks to guarantee about $250 billion in debt for an OpenAI data-center campus in Ohio, in addition to a separate arrangement to help finance OpenAI's purchase of Nvidia chips. Investors and commentators described the structure as circular financing, in which a supplier lends its customer the money to buy the supplier's own products. Several compared the pattern to the arrangements that preceded the dot-com collapse.

The selling deepened in Asia. South Korea's Kospi index closed down 10.84% at 6,023.63 on Tuesday, after the Korea Exchange triggered its marketwide circuit breaker for the eighth time this year when the index fell more than 8% in the morning session, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported. Samsung Electronics fell 13.39% and SK Hynix 14.65%, the two chipmakers most exposed to AI memory demand. The rout was compounded by reports that China had begun mass-producing its own deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography equipment, which investors read as evidence that Chinese chipmakers are advancing toward self-reliance despite United States export controls, according to CNBC. Bitcoin fell roughly 2% after the United States close, according to CoinDesk, while gold held near $4,090 an ounce.

The episode shows how concentrated the global equity advance had become. Nvidia's shares had risen only about 4% in 2026 before Monday, against a 24% gain for Apple, whose management has chosen to rent AI computing capacity rather than build it.