The logo of SoftBank is displayed at a company shop in Tokyo, Japan January 28, 2025.
Issei Kato | Reuters
Shares of SoftBank Group plunged nearly 9% on Friday, marking its third straight day of selloff after the Japanese giant said it had sold its entire stake in U.S. chip giant Nvidia for $5.83 billion.
The stock pared losses to trade 5% lower as of 9 p.m. ET. If the losses hold, this would mark the second straight week of selloff after the conglomerate saw almost $50 billion in market cap wiped out last week, marking its worst weekly loss since March 2020.
SoftBank disclosed in its latest earnings that it offloaded 32.1 million Nvidia shares in October and scaled back its T-Mobile stake, bringing in $9.17 billion.
Although the Nvidia sale surprised some investors, it isn’t the first time SoftBank has exited the U.S. chip giant. Its Vision Fund had accumulated roughly $4 billion worth of Nvidia shares in 2017 before selling out entirely in early 2019.
Even so, SoftBank continues to have business ties to Nvidia. The Tokyo-based company is involved in a number of AI ventures that use Nvidia’s technology, including the $500 billion Stargate project for data centers in the U.S.
Several other tech stocks in the region also declined. Semiconductor testing equipment maker Advantest and Tokyo Electron, a chip production equipment maker, fell by over 3% and 4% respectively.
Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, fell 2.04%. South Korean memory chip giant SK Hynix was more than 5% lower, while Samsung Electronics lost 3.8%.
Shares of Tencent declined 5.61%, while JD.com was down 4.31%.
Overnight in the U.S., technology giants came away battered. Nvidia and Broadcom notably declined 3.6% and 4.3%, respectively, while Google parent Alphabet fell 2.8%.