trading

A tech stock rout that began overnight in the United States has persisted in Asian trading.

Market authorities in South Korea paused trading on Friday as prices plunged across the region. Global markets have been rattled by a sharp fall in the trading price of tech stocks, which is driven by fears that the Democrats’ victory in the US midterm elections will increase regulatory scrutiny of AI and slow the country’s data centre build-out.

Japan’s Nikkei index slumped 6 percent, its deepest one-day drop since April 2025. Indices in South Korea and Taiwan plunged more than 8 percent after the opening bell, before cutting losses as authorities scrambled to stem the selling.

Wall Street’s volatility “fear gauge” soared overnight on Thursday and the tech-focused Nasdaq sank 5.5 percent, wiping $3 trillion off S&P 500 firms, as investors fretted that the Democrats could put the brakes on the AI boom being encouraged by President Donald Trump.

“It was a brutal morning for many investors here in Asia. We saw that the AI sell-off continues here across many countries,” Al Jazeera’s Katrina Yu reported from Beijing.

“Some of those major markets have fortunately recovered some of those losses, but all of them are still clearly in the red,” she said.

Analysts say the political jitters are hitting an AI trade already on shaky footing due to worries about returns on massive spending on related infrastructure.

“The selloff shows that AI stock prices had been built on rosy illusions about the future, and now that illusion is gone,” Dong Baozhen, chairman of asset manager Lingtong Shengtai, told the Reuters news agency.

“The US stock market has been the standard-bearer and backbone of the global AI bull run. Now that backbone has snapped. Can AI bull markets elsewhere hold up on their own?”

Authorities step in

Markets cut some of their losses by the time Asian markets closed, as authorities worked to stem the panic.

Trading on South Korea’s Kospi market was temporarily halted amid the sharp slide. Finance Minister Lee Hyoung-il also eased rules on retail investors’ leveraged investments.

In China, state entities stepped in to buy up equities in a bid to stabilise the market, said Al Jazeera’s Yu.

The Taiwan stock market closed down 4.5 percent, recovering somewhat from its early morning slump. For the week, the index clocked a 12.2 percent decline, its biggest since 1991, LSEG data showed.

The government of the island state, a key producer of chips, sought to talk up the prospects for the sector.

Demand ⁠for emerging technologies like AI, ⁠high-performance computing and ⁠cloud services is expected to keep expanding, driving ‌demand for tech companies, the economy ministry said in a statement issued on Friday.

Korean AI chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix fell nearly 6 percent and 9.4 percent respectively, cutting steep losses from earlier. TSMC fell as much as 8.5 percent in Taiwan, before closing down 4.7 percent.

In Japan, Kioxia plunged 11 percent while AI investor SoftBank Group slid 11 percent.

New regulations

The selling indicates investors are starting to factor in increased opposition to data centres. Analysts say markets have yet to fully consider the cost such building work has imposed on communities.

Toby Walsh, the chief scientist for the AI Institute at Australia’s University of New South Wales, said he expected new regulations on data centres in many countries, including the US, Australia and the United Kingdom.

“The developers were building them in a way that wasn’t actually getting social licence,” Walsh told Al Jazeera.

“They were building them in places where they didn’t need to build. You don’t have to build data centres in urban areas. You can build them in the middle of nowhere.

“I think it’s actually for the good of the tech industry in the United States that this has happened,” he added. “We’re spending money a bit too quickly. And maybe this is the way to let that bubble deflate in a manageable way.”

A FedEx truck parked near the sprawling grading center of Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) in Santa Ana was robbed a week ago of trading cards worth nearly $1 million, the Santa Ana Police Department said.

PSA reported to police that two stolen pallets of about 100 packages of cards apiece had an approximate value of $963,000. About 50 packages from a third pallet were also stolen, and their value was still being calculated as of Tuesday morning.

The cards had been sent from all over the country to PSA to be graded, a necessary step for collectors in authenticating their wares. Items included primarily sports cards and Pokémon cards, as well as one-of-one pieces. The cards had been graded and were set to be returned to their owners when they were stolen.

The FedEx driver left the vehicle, which was parked near PSA’s shipping and receiving address at 1610 E. St. Andrew Place, for an hour to 90 minutes, police said. The truck lock was busted and packages stolen while he was away.

“It remains an open case,” Santa Ana police spokesperson Natalie Garcia told NBC News, “and we have not made any arrests or recovered any stolen goods.”

PSA said it was taking measures to prevent the stolen cards from circulating through the usual venues and marketplaces while also reimbursing card owners for at least a portion of their losses. Trading cards and other collectibles are verified and assigned condition grades by PSA, which establishes their value and protects them by assigning serial numbers and certification information. PSA said it has deactivated the certificates tied to the stolen items.

“We have deactivated the certificates for the stolen items and notified marketplace partners so they can be on the lookout for rare and serialized items,” PSA said in a statement. “Our customer service team has contacted affected customers directly and is arranging compensation based on fair market value.”

PSA sent a letter to affected cards owners, detailing the steps taken to make the owners whole.

“After leaving our PSA facility in Southern California, a FedEx vehicle transporting PSA orders was burglarized, and items were stolen,” the letter read, continuing with a list of items titled “What we are doing.”

Among the items are deactivating the serial numbers on the affected items, notifying commerce partners across digital, auction and other selling platforms so they can look out for stolen items; aiding FedEx and law enforcement in their investigations; and studying what happened so a repeat can be avoided.

Nick Andrews, whose social media persona is the Boston Card Hunter, is keeping track of items reported stolen, a number that had exceeded 1,000 by Tuesday morning. He wrote on X that one victim had cards worth $500,000 stolen.

Card trader Sky-B said on a video that 104 of the cards he collected over the past two years are missing. They had been certified at PSA and were being returned to him in Michigan when he learned about the theft. He said he spent $8,000 on grading, and the cards carried insurance of up to $156,000, less than their market value.

“There were cards in that order that you can’t replace,” Sky-B said.

Longtime sports business reporter Darren Rovell, an avid trading card and memorabilia collector since childhood, said on social media that expensive collectibles are at risk any time they are shipped. Not only can shipping labels and declared insurance values reveal their potential contents, “the simple name PSA or Collectors in the address box is the threat,” Rovell wrote.