By Noel Randewich and Chuck Mikolajczak
NEW YORK, Nov 10 (Reuters) - Technology shares were in the red again on Tuesday, with Anthropic's steps toward a big IPO failing to calm general anxiety about the health
of the AI sector.
Selling was driven by a hot US inflation report that increased expectations the Federal Reserve will raise rates again next month, alongside Nvidia's hiring lawyers for an internal investigation tied to its CEO and the development of an Ohio data center getting more complicated.
Many investors remained optimistic about the prospects for AI investments while allowing that volatility has become a fact of market life this fall. The Nasdaq Composite was off 1% on Tuesday afternoon. Over the past month, the index has dropped by 1% or more eight times and risen by 1% or more six times.
"There is concern about what happens at the top at Nvidia, and if he's replaced, who's he replaced with," said Tim Ghriskey, senior portfolio strategist at Ingalls & Snyder in New York, who said he sees selling in Nvidia and other major AI firms as buying opportunities. "But I don’t see Nvidia falling apart. I see a very strong company hit by something not of its own making."
Besides Nvidia, down 6.5%, the major decliners were mostly big beneficiaries of the AI rally that swept markets for the first two-thirds of this year. Server maker Dell Technologies was down 4.8% on Tuesday but up 161% for the year, according to LSEG data, while chip firm Sandisk was down 4.5% for the day and up 257% for the year.
Among the neoclouds, smaller AI infrastructure firms that have been under pressure this month amid concerns about their capacity to raise funds under tighter market conditions, Iren dropped 10%, Nebius fell 7% and CoreWeave slid 3%. All three have declined by at least 40% since the Nasdaq hit its most recent high on October 6. CoreWeave is due to report earnings after the close on Tuesday.
Many investors said they thought general market anxiety was behind much of the selling, despite a newsy day across AI-related subjects. British cloud services provider Nscale is considering delaying a $35 billion stock market listing, The Telegraph reported on Tuesday.
Shares of power equipment maker GE Vernova slid more than 6% on Tuesday, after Japanese investment firm SoftBank revised equipment procurement plans for its US data center projects. GE Vernova is among the companies involved in the development of SoftBank's colossal gas-fired power plant and data center in Pike County, Ohio, analysts said.
Nvidia’s was on track to shed more than $470 billion in market value over two sessions as concerns mounted over the fallout from CEO Jensen Huang's affair with a Chinese businesswoman alleged to be a spy for Beijing.
Even so, investors were mostly focused on the longer-term picture.
"We can always ascribe a reason as to why things are more volatile. And they have been more volatile the last few weeks for sure, since October, let's call it," said Jason Ware, chief investment officer at Albion Financial Group in Salt Lake City, Utah. "But at the end of the day, the path for stocks over the coming weeks and months is going to be really a story of earnings."
Following Tuesday’s inflation report, many investors will be focusing on the next big events for technology stocks, which stand to be Nvidia’s earnings report after the close a week from today and Anthropic’s IPO in the days after, regardless of what stocks do on a given day.
“We're probably gonna have record earnings again next year unless we see a recession or a massive pivoting on AI capex, and I don't expect either one,” said Ware, whose firm owns Nvidia. “And so I think that's going to be the signal is the trajectory of earnings, the economy growing more than 2%. And the rest of this is sort of just short-term noise that will, like I said, get ironed out over time."
(Reporting by Noel Randewich and Chuck Mikolajczak, editing by Colin Barr and Nick Zieminski)
