Chipmakers sell off sharply amid AI slowdown concerns

Semiconductor stocks took a beating on September 14 after some of AI’s most prominent executives suggested the industry should pump the brakes on frontier model development. NVIDIA fell roughly 3.4%. AMD and Broadcom each dropped more than 4%. Intel shed about 6%. The PHLX semiconductor index, the broadest barometer for the chip sector, slid approximately 5.9% in a single session. What spooked the market The catalyst was a coordinated set of remarks from executives at Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, all pointing to safety concerns around the pace of AI advancement. When the people building the most powerful AI systems publicly advocate for caution, traders tend to hear “less compute needed” and act accordingly. A slowdown in training new frontier models would primarily affect the R&D budgets of AI developers, not the infrastructure orders already locked in with chipmakers. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan confirmed on the same day that the company’s AI revenue targets remain unchanged, signaling that the pipeline of orders from hyperscale customers hasn’t wavered. The numbers behind the reassurance BofA Global Research projects that combined 2026 capital spending from Microsoft, Alphabet, Ama...