AI financing storm hits, risks stand out for Asia's AI star companies.

The continued sell-off in US tech stocks has exposed a new risk point in Asia's AI supply chain: rising financing costs may cut off the capital expenditure needed to sustain the AI boom, threatening the profitability of companies across the entire supply chainand this supply chain is the core driver of this round of gains in Asian equities. Goldman Sachs' basket of Asian AI hardware stocks plunged 11% last week, the biggest weekly drop since mid-July. Despite TSMC's optimistic revenue outlook, the selling momentum has yet to slow, reflecting that market concerns over AI capital expenditure are spreading across the entire hardware supply chain. Jan Shi Cortesi, a fund manager at GAM Investment Management in Zurich, said: "Financing costs are like gravity, weighing on the AI boom. Rising borrowing costs will make it harder to finance infrastructure projects and delay capital expenditure. Even a mere delay will lower earnings expectations and valuations for Asian suppliers." The market's focus of concern is no longer just whether AI chip demand can be sustained, but whether hyperscale cloud providers and neoclouds can continue to finance the deployment of computing infrastructure, and whether expected returns can match the massive scale of investment. TSMC, SK Hynix, and Samsung Electronics supply the chips and memory needed for AI computing, but their earnings ultimately depend on sustained downstream investment in infrastructure and product procurement. Component and equipment suppliers face the same underlying risk, and have even lower visibility into the timing of individual project implementations. Kevin Net, a fund manager at Financiere de l'Echiquier in Paris, said: "Compared with the core computing ecosystem, downstream beneficiary companies bear greater AI financing pressure. Simply put, the further away from the core chip business, the higher the risk of project delays." Gartner warns that by 2030, more than $3.5 trillion in AI infrastructure investment may face impairment risk, and the scale of investment may exceed the revenue levels that can support returns.