The facade of Norway’s central bank, also known as Norges Bank, in Oslo, Norway.
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Norges Bank Investment Management — the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world — on Thursday reported a first-quarter loss of 415 billion kroner ($40 billion), citing weakness in the tech sector.
“The quarter has been impacted by significant market fluctuations. Our equity investments had a negative return, largely driven by the tech sector,” CEO Nicolai Tangen said in a statement.
The fund’s value hit 18.53 trillion kroner at the end of March, with 70% of its investment placed in equities — an asset class for which it recorded a loss of 1.6%.
The fund’s market value decreased by 1.215 trillion kroner through the first quarter, largely due to adverse currency movements.
“The krone strengthened against several of the main currencies during the quarter. The currency movements contributed to a decrease in the fund’s value of -879 billion kroner,” the fund said in a statement.
The Danish currency rose by around 0.3% against the U.S. dollar in the three months ending March 31.
Aside from equities, fixed incomes represents 27.7% of the fund holdings and returned 1.6% over the first quarter. Unlisted real estate account for 1.9% of the assets and yielded 2.4% gains across the period.
NBIM manages the fund on behalf of the Norwegian population. Set up in the 1990s to invest excess revenues from Norway’s oil and gas industry, the fund currently invests in more than 8,600 companies across 63 countries.
It holds positions in U.S. tech giants, with the fund being a major shareholder in Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla and Microsoft. NBIM’s comments over weakness in the tech sector comes after a three-week sell-off of the industry’s megacaps in March saw $2.7 trillion wiped from their market value, amid mounting fears around the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs policies.
The downtrun followed a January tech sell-off driven by the emergence of an AI model developed by China’s DeepSeek. The little-known startup said it had developed its large language model at a fraction of the cost of leading U.S. rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, leading to steep losses for companies including AI darling Nvidia.
Earlier this year, NBIM reported a record $222 billion annual profit on the back of a tech rally driven by 2024’s AI boom.