Good morning, you're listening to Markets Desk.
Semiconductor stocks took a sharp hit Tuesday, but history offers some reassurance. A look back at seventeen comparable one-day plunges in the sector over the past fifteen years shows these declines tend to be short-lived, with chips often recovering meaningfully within weeks as demand fundamentals reassert themselves.
Shifting to Europe, the German DAX fell one-point-one percent Wednesday, with defense giant Rheinmetall leading the damage, dropping sixteen percent. The selloff reflects two converging anxieties — uncertainty over whether a US-Iran deal actually holds, and growing investor concern about the cost burden of AI infrastructure buildout weighing on defense and tech crossover names.
On that infrastructure cost question, Congress may be moving toward an answer. A House subcommittee is advancing legislation that would require tech companies to pay the energy costs associated with running AI data centers directly. Right now those costs are often distributed across the broader grid, so this bill would represent a meaningful shift in how AI's power appetite gets priced into corporate balance sheets.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
