 The week in review
The week delivered a sharp pullback in the valuation of the biggest AI bets. Alphabet led the rout with a $500 billion market cap loss, its shares slumping 12 percent after reports of a slump in its cloud division. Nvidia shares fell 4.7 percent as a DOJ probe into its Hugging Face acquisition and a report on its CEO's associates overshadowed strong Vera chip benchmarks. Amazon shares slid 3.3 percent as its quarterly profit missed targets.
The appetite for datacentre spending held steady but faced new scrutiny. NextDC shares rose 8.4 percent, even as Google faced a Finnish criminal investigation over forest clearance for a local campus. Microsoft outlined a $25 billion bond sale to fund its infrastructure build. The ASX 200 rose 2 percent, insulating local tech names from the broader US selloff.
Robotics and crypto mirrored the risk-off sentiment. DroneShield and Intuitive Surgical fell more than five percent each, while Tesla shares eked out a 1.8 percent gain. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.2 percent, and Solana lost 5.9 percent, confirming a cautious read on the sector given rising regulatory and operational headwinds. |