Chip stocks plunge, but bargain-hunters limit scale of tech rout

By Shashwat Chauhan

June 23 (Reuters) - U.S. chip stocks fell from record highs on Tuesday in a reversal for buyers of shares linked to the AI infrastructure buildout that has powered the market over the past year.

The Nasdaq Composite index fell 2.2%, led by a 7.9% decline in the semiconductor index that has emerged in recent months as the leader of a record-setting rally. Micron Technology, one of the biggest gainers of the latest stage of the AI boom, tumbled 13%.

The tech selloff has pushed the Nasdaq down more than 5% from its peak on June 2, pulling back after a blistering 30% rally that started at the beginning of April. The world's most valuable company, Nvidia, dropped 4.1%, pushing its market cap below $5 trillion. It and Tesla, down 5.8%, were among the biggest drags on the Nasdaq outside the chip sector.

Tuesday's chip rout was a setback for a market whose sharp recovery from the March 30 Iran war lows has surprised even die-hard bulls, and pointed out the risks accumulating in indexes such as the Sox, which even after the pullback is up 72% since then.

Elon Musk's SpaceX briefly traded below $2 trillion in market cap for the first time since its debut earlier this month before rebounding into positive territory and closing 1% higher.

Chipmakers clocked heavy losses, with Qualcomm down 8% and Marvell down 9.4%. Micron will report earnings after the markets close on Wednesday.

"The trade has been highly concentrated and flow-driven, which makes it vulnerable to relatively small shifts in sentiment," said Ross Mayfield, investment strategy analyst at Baird.

"It doesn't appear to be closely tied to the fundamentals of the AI story, but rather to the heavy concentration and strong inflows into global tech over the past few months now starting to unwind."

Memory chipmakers — the best-performing stocks on the S&P 500 so far this year — lagged on Tuesday, with SanDisk falling 14% and Western Digital losing 8.5%. Memory chipmakers in South Korea also recorded steep declines.

TECH GIANTS MIXED

Other tech heavyweights were mixed, with Alphabet off 1%, Apple off 0.9% and Microsoft up 1.8%. Software stocks like Workday and Salesforce were also higher; those shares sold off heavily earlier this year on AI-linked fears.

Commonly dubbed hyperscalers, these firms have committed billions to ramp up their AI infrastructures, though clearer evidence that AI products can generate returns justifying the spending remains elusive.

Lauren Hyslop, investment manager at Mattioli Woods, said the selloff was due to a more challenging interest-rate backdrop and concerns about the scale of capital required to fund the next phase of AI investment.

SpaceX's record-breaking IPO fueled a trading frenzy in its first week as a listed company, but shares have unraveled in the past few trading sessions, erasing more than $600 billion in market capitalization since last Wednesday.

"I'd be cautious about seeing this as a second-chance buying opportunity. The drop looks dramatic in scale, but these swings aren't unusual for a stock with such a small public float," said Nic Puckrin, cross-asset analyst and founder of Coin Bureau.

The company's shares are still more than 10% above their IPO price of $135. SpaceX also announced a bond offering earlier this week.

Big IPOs often face turbulence in their early days on the public market. A Reuters analysis of 50 IPOs with the highest valuations in the past five years showed investors would have been better off buying an S&P 500 index fund about three-quarters of the time than buying into a big IPO.

Rate-sensitive technology stocks have also been hurt by expectations of tighter monetary policy under U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh, especially as recent economic data points to a resilient economy.

(Reporting by Shashwat Chauhan and Medha Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai, Colin Barr, David Gaffen and Aurora Ellis)