Dow Jones futures fall following tech selloff, Middle East tensions
- US index futures remain mixed as AI spending concerns and rising tech debt weigh heavily on broader market sentiment.
- Major tech shares, including Tesla, Nvidia, AMD, and Meta, pulled down the Nasdaq and S&P 500.
- Escalating Middle East conflict drove safe-haven bond flows, shifting 10-year Treasury yields near 4.98%.
Dow Jones futures decline by 0.37% to trade near 52,870 during European hours on Friday. S&P 500 futures fall 0.07% to trade around 7,700, while Nasdaq 100 futures gain 0.16% to trade near 29,190.
US stock futures post mixed results following a sharp decline in technology shares during the previous day, as growing concerns over the sustainability of artificial intelligence investments weighed on market sentiment.
During Thursday’s regular US trading session, the Nasdaq Composite and S&P 500 fell 2.6% and 1.21%, respectively, while the Dow edged up 0.02%. Major laggards included memory chipmakers Micron and SanDisk, semiconductor giants Nvidia and AMD, and Elon Musk’s companies SpaceX and Tesla. This selloff followed Meta Platforms' plans to increase capital expenditure, which reignited worries that technology companies may take on additional debt to fund their AI infrastructure expansion.
Meanwhile, escalating tensions in the Middle East added further pressure on equities, prompting investors to seek the relative safety of bonds. The yield on the US 10-year Treasury note rebounded to near 4.98% on Friday after sliding by more than 10 basis points the previous day to a one-month low. Prior to this, US bonds had faced upward pressure from safe-haven flows triggered by the deepening selloff in technology and artificial intelligence stocks.
AI growth jitters deepen as semiconductor and CoreWeave stocks tumble
Analysts at Deutsche Bank highlight that the broader risk-off tone was compounded by renewed doubts over the durability of AI-driven growth. They note that “yesterday also brought a fresh wave of concern around AI-driven growth, reversing some of the optimism from earlier in the week,” leaving several of the most exposed names facing a “rough session.” In particular, the Philly semiconductor index “(-6.72%) had its worst day since June,” while CoreWeave’s share price “(-10.06%) fell to its lowest since May 2025,” underscoring how quickly sentiment has swung against the AI complex.
AI stocks FAQs
First and foremost, artificial intelligence is an academic discipline that seeks to recreate the cognitive functions, logical understanding, perceptions and pattern recognition of humans in machines. Often abbreviated as AI, artificial intelligence has a number of sub-fields including artificial neural networks, machine learning or predictive analytics, symbolic reasoning, deep learning, natural language processing, speech recognition, image recognition and expert systems. The end goal of the entire field is the creation of artificial general intelligence or AGI. This means producing a machine that can solve arbitrary problems that it has not been trained to solve.
There are a number of different use cases for artificial intelligence. The most well-known of them are generative AI platforms that use training on large language models (LLMs) to answer text-based queries. These include ChatGPT and Google’s Bard platform. Midjourney is a program that generates original images based on user-created text. Other forms of AI utilize probabilistic techniques to determine a quality or perception of an entity, like Upstart’s lending platform, which uses an AI-enhanced credit rating system to determine credit worthiness of applicants by scouring the internet for data related to their career, wealth profile and relationships. Other types of AI use large databases from scientific studies to generate new ideas for possible pharmaceuticals to be tested in laboratories. YouTube, Spotify, Facebook and other content aggregators use AI applications to suggest personalized content to users by collecting and organizing data on their viewing habits.
Nvidia (NVDA) is a semiconductor company that builds both the AI-focused computer chips and some of the platforms that AI engineers use to build their applications. Many proponents view Nvidia as the pick-and-shovel play for the AI revolution since it builds the tools needed to carry out further applications of artificial intelligence. Palantir Technologies (PLTR) is a “big data” analytics company. It has large contracts with the US intelligence community, which uses its Gotham platform to sift through data and determine intelligence leads and inform on pattern recognition. Its Foundry product is used by major corporations to track employee and customer data for use in predictive analytics and discovering anomalies. Microsoft (MSFT) has a large stake in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, the latter of which has not gone public. Microsoft has integrated OpenAI’s technology with its Bing search engine.
Following the introduction of ChatGPT to the general public in late 2022, many stocks associated with AI began to rally. Nvidia for instance advanced well over 200% in the six months following the release. Immediately, pundits on Wall Street began to wonder whether the market was being consumed by another tech bubble. Famous investor Stanley Druckenmiller, who has held major investments in both Palantir and Nvidia, said that bubbles never last just six months. He said that if the excitement over AI did become a bubble, then the extreme valuations would last at least two and a half years or long like the DotCom bubble in the late 1990s. At the midpoint of 2023, the best guess is that the market is not in a bubble, at least for now. Yes, Nvidia traded at 27 times forward sales at that time, but analysts were predicting extremely high revenue growth for years to come. At the height of the DotCom bubble, the NASDAQ 100 traded for 60 times earnings, but in mid-2023 the index traded at 25 times earnings.
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