SoftBank, TSMC stock fall after Nvidia drops in US

Asian chip stocks fell sharply on Friday after Nvidia’s shares dropped in the US, despite the American chipmaker reporting strong earnings and a positive outlook.

SoftBank, which owns British semiconductor firm Arm, plunged over 10% in Tokyo.

SK Hynix, Nvidia’s main supplier of high-bandwidth memory, dropped nearly 10%, while Samsung Electronics lost more than 5%.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the largest contract chipmaker, fell over 4% in Taipei, and Foxconn declined 4%.

Renesas Electronics slipped 2.3%, Tokyo Electron fell 5.3%, and Lasertec lost more than 3.5%.

The selloff hit both major and smaller Asian chip firms, after Nvidia’s 3% drop overnight in the US, despite beating Wall Street expectations for Q3 and offering stronger Q4 guidance.

🔗 Source: CNBC

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Nvidia flags supply and packaging tightness the market ignored

Q3 data center revenue reached $51.2 billion as shares fell 3% after exceeding estimates 1. CEO Jensen Huang said “cloud GPUs are sold out” and in October put AI chip orders for 2025–2026 at $500 billion 1.
In fiscal Q3 2025, it shipped 13,000 GPU samples, including a Blackwell DGX (Nvidia’s integrated AI server) sample to OpenAI 2. Oracle announced AI clusters scaling to over 131,000 Blackwell GPUs 2. ABF substrates (Ajinomoto Build-up Film that routes power and signals beneath chips) and advanced packaging (specialized chip assembly) now have longer order lines 2.
Blackwell led per‑GPU MLPerf (industry‑standard machine learning) with a 2.2x gain over Hopper and needed 64 GPUs for the GPT‑3 test versus 256 H100s 2. That will not cut substrate use since AI infrastructure spend keeps rising, and Huang said pretraining, post‑training, and inference are growing 2.

Capacity timing at ABF makers and OSATs (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) shapes 2025 AI server surge

ABF substrate capacity is the bottleneck, with the market at $11.11 billion in 2025 at 9.4% CAGR 3. Demand comes from the Blackwell rollout plus high performance computing (HPC) or AI parts that need layers with finer pitches.
Watch capacity adds from Anhui Splendid Technology, Aoxin Semiconductor Technology, and Keruisi Semiconductor Technology 4. These China-based ABF entrants challenge the top five that hold 70% share 3. The selloff in Asian chip names offers a chance to buy suppliers with 2025 expansions locked in, and guidance near $65 billion for Q4 1 plus Huang’s view of no near-term digestion 2 support steady substrate orders.