Tonight's Highlights: AI Sustainability Questioned; US Futures Slide as Chip Sector Under Pressure Again

US equity futures rolled over on Friday. Technology shares faced renewed selling pressure and semiconductors led the decline as broader market anxieties intensified over mounting AI infrastructure costs. Major European benchmarks broadly moved lower.

 

Apple shares dropped 6% on Thursday after announcing price hikes for its iPad and MacBook lineups, citing elevated component costs from rising memory and storage demand.

 

Microsoft shed over 3% after announcing higher pricing for its Xbox consoles, similarly citing a surge in hardware component costs. Alphabet and Meta both closed lower during the session.

 

Julia Hermann, Global Market Strategist at New York Life Investment Management, noted on Thursday: "The market is currently testing investor conviction. Leadership has become highly concentrated within semiconductor and memory heavyweights, which inherently carry higher volatility than the Magnificent Seven leadership seen in prior years."

 

She added: "Concurrently, we are seeing a dramatic repricing of the Federal Reserve’s policy trajectory. The market is not just reassessing whether a rate hike is back on the table, but specifically why the Fed might be forced to hike again. Against this backdrop, heightened market volatility is practically inevitable."

 

According to media reports, OpenAI is considering pushing its initial public offering back to next year, driven by underwhelming post-IPO performance from SpaceX and accelerating volatility across the broader artificial intelligence cohort.

 

JPMorgan traders noted in a client dispatch that the potential delay has sparked deep institutional anxiety regarding the long-term sustainability of AI infrastructure spending, given OpenAI's deferred access to public capital markets.

 

Adam Crisafulli, founder of Vital Knowledge, stated that an OpenAI IPO delay "could downshift the broader velocity of AI infrastructure deployment."

 

Global AI-related proxies pulled back sharply on the news, with selling pressure hitting Asian trading desks particularly hard. SoftBank Group, a prominent backer of OpenAI, led the tech-sector liquidation in Asia with a 12% collapse on Friday.

 

South Korean equities closed sharply lower as tech liquidations dragged the benchmark KOSPI down 5.81% to finish at 8,411.21. In Japan, the Nikkei 225 index similarly faltered, retreating 4.15% to close at 69,360.88.

 

In US premarket trading, memory heavyweights Micron Technology and SanDisk both shed over 6%.

 

In the CPU and logic space, AMD and Arm fell over 4%, Intel dropped nearly 4%, and Qualcomm pulled back over 2%. GPU leader Nvidia ticked down nearly 2%.

Corporate Dispatches

Apple Overhauls Mac Silicon Roadmap; Next-Gen High-End Chips to Leap Directly to M7 Architecture

Apple is orchestrating one of the most significant strategic pivots in the history of its Mac silicon roadmap, preparing to transition its next-generation high-end processors directly into an AI-focused architecture.

 

People familiar with the matter state that Apple, which currently utilizes the M5 series, plans to deploy baseline M6 processors for entry-level Macs as early as this year, but will skip high-end Pro and Max variants of the M6 entirely.

 

Instead, the company targets a 2027 debut for next-generation Pro and Max silicon featuring advanced compute and graphics capabilities, integrated directly into a new M7 framework.

 

OpenAI Leaning Toward 2026 IPO Delay

Three people familiar with the matter report that OpenAI is increasingly leaning toward pushing its initial public offering into next year.

 

Underwriting bankers advising OpenAI have warned that recent equity volatility across tech names, paired with SpaceX's choppy trading post-listing, risks cooling retail investor appetite for the issuance. Previous reports indicated OpenAI was working alongside Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to target a listing as early as this autumn.

 

SpaceX Planning New Starlink Mobile Services for US Consumers

SpaceX has briefed allocators on plans to launch a new Starlink mobile service tier tailored for US retail consumers. SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell disclosed during an IPO roadshow presentation that the aerospace firm is actively evaluating the rollout of these dedicated Starlink retail products.

 

Samsung Multi-Year Korea Investment Pipeline Projecting KRW 1,000 Trillion

Samsung Group is expected to announce a massive domestic investment roadmap on June 29, earmarking KRW 1,000 trillion (approximately $647.53 billion) over the next ten years. The capital expenditure framework is said to include a KRW 300 trillion allocation dedicated to constructing new semiconductor fabrication facilities in southwestern South Korea.