SoftBank sinks over 9 percent as Asia chip stocks track Wall Street's AI selloff

Asian technology stocks fell sharply as a fresh selloff in US semiconductor shares spread across the region, according to CNBC, with SoftBank closing more than 9 percent lower and chip equipment makers Tokyo Electron and Advantest both losing more than 8 percent, tracking steep overnight losses on Wall Street. The selloff extended a rough week for chip stocks broadly, which entered a bear market after a key industry gauge sank around 20 percent from its record high, driven by growing investor worry that AI infrastructure spending has outrun the revenue needed to justify it. Japanese memory chipmaker Kioxia was hit even harder, plunging more than 16 percent after a federal jury in Texas ordered the company to pay 229 million dollars in damages for infringing a Viasat patent related to computer memory technology, a separate legal setback compounding the broader market pressure. The proximate trigger for the latest leg of the selloff was Moonshot AI's release of Kimi K3, a powerful new open weight model from China that, similar to DeepSeek's debut the previous year, raised fresh doubts about whether a cheaper, freely available rival could dent demand for the chips and infrastructure underpinning the leading US labs. Investors including Apollo Global Management's Torsten Slok have flagged a widening mismatch between AI hyperscalers' capital spending and their free cash flow, a gap that becomes harder to justify if competition from low cost open models compresses the revenue those companies expect to earn from their AI investments.