Nvidia, AMD and Micron stocks fell in Thursday pre-market trading as Wall Street’s AI sell-off shifted from concerns about demand to questions over who can afford to keep financing the infrastructure boom.
Nvidia slipped 1.8%, AMD dropped 2.5% and Micron lost 4%, while Nasdaq 100 futures fell about 1.3%. The pressure followed hotter US inflation and stress across indebted AI infrastructure companies.
The crash comes as chip demand remains strong, but the market is questioning whether financing costs and slower enterprise adoption can undermine future spending before current orders weaken.
AI financing risk hits Nvidia and AMD stocks
CoreWeave is the clearest warning sign. The Nvidia customer fell another 4.5% before Thursday’s open after plunging 15% on Wednesday.
Its bonds have weakened sharply as investors demand greater compensation for financing expensive data centres and GPU capacity.
Bernstein analyst Madison Rezaei told Investor’s Business Daily that CoreWeave’s unsecured bond yields had approached 15%, levels “typically associated with distress.”
That matters upstream. Nvidia and AMD depend on customers continuing to build clusters of accelerators, while Micron benefits from accompanying demand for high-bandwidth and conventional memory.
If financing costs rise sharply, marginal data-centre projects become harder to justify even when demand for AI services remains healthy. Future chip orders can therefore come under scrutiny before suppliers see deterioration in current shipments.
Enterprise AI adoption puts Micron stock under pressure
The question is whether corporate adoption is catching up with expectations priced into AI hardware.
Barclays downgraded Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NetApp this week after share-price gains, arguing that enterprise AI spending has not yet reached a meaningful inflection point.
“We believe the strong enterprise revenues are more of a function of memory costs than a move to enterprise AI at this time,” analyst Tim Long wrote.
That warning is particularly relevant for Micron. Higher memory prices can produce exceptional near-term revenue and margins, but investors increasingly want evidence that underlying AI consumption will expand fast enough to justify those prices and the capacity being built around them.
The contradiction matters, as hardware revenues can remain strong while investors become less confident about the quality and durability of that growth.
After huge rallies across memory and AI infrastructure stocks, good numbers may no longer be sufficient.
Strong AI demand still faces a valuation test
The bearish case is not that the AI boom has ended.
TSMC reported its sixth consecutive quarter of record profit on Thursday, with net income rising 69%.
The company said AI demand remains robust and continues to exceed supply, although it struck a cautious tone on 2027 because of macroeconomic uncertainty.
Jefferies economist Mohit Kumar told Reuters that “a slowdown in the AI infrastructure build-out would imply a sharp slowdown in US growth expectations.”
He nevertheless expects earnings season to show that demand and profits remain robust.
Nvidia, AMD and Micron do not need AI spending to collapse for their shares to struggle. Growth only needs to fall short of expectations embedded in valuations.
Higher rates make that hurdle harder. Expensive financing raises the return customers must earn from AI investments, while slower enterprise adoption lengthens the time required to generate those returns.
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