US stock futures are mixed amid the repercussions of “NVIDIA” and fears of artificial intelligence

Futures linked to the Nasdaq 100 index, which is heavy on technology stocks, fell slightly in early trading on Friday, after a week marked by volatility and raising concerns about investments in the artificial intelligence sector, against the backdrop of turmoil surrounding Nvidia, one of the largest electronic chip manufacturers.

The company's shares rose by 1.8 percent in pre-market trading, after suffering losses amounting to about 11 percent during the week until the close of trading on Thursday, when its CEO, Jensen Huang, resigned, following reports of a romantic relationship with a person suspected of being a Chinese spy, according to Reuters.

Despite their rise in pre-opening trading, Nvidia shares are still heading towards recording the longest series of weekly losses since October 2012.

This issue threatens to extend its repercussions to the broader artificial intelligence sector. Given the pivotal role played by NVIDIA in the boom in this sector. Investors said the company's financing arrangements with a number of other artificial intelligence companies may come under greater scrutiny in the wake of the change in its leadership.

“I'm pessimistic about AI stocks,” said Shawn Beach, founder and portfolio manager of Ranmore Fund Management. Investors should get out of these waves before they collapse, and there is a big wave that we are currently witnessing in the artificial intelligence sector.”

At the same time, investors are awaiting the release of producer price inflation data in the United States for October, which may play a decisive role in determining the size of the next increase in interest rates by the Federal Reserve (the US central bank) next month.

Market transactions show full pricing in the possibility of raising interest rates, while some monetary policymakers at the central bank in recent days have raised the possibility of a larger increase of 50 basis points, compared to a limited increase of 25 basis points that was widely expected. The probability of an increase of 50 basis points is about 12 percent, according to the CME Group’s “Feed Watch” tool.

As of 5:03 a.m. EST, the Dow Jones Industrial Average futures rose by 98 points, or 0.19 percent, and the Standard & Poor's 500 futures rose by 9.75 points, or 0.13 percent, while the Nasdaq 100 futures fell by 31 points, or 0.11 percent.

Weak investor sentiment towards artificial intelligence stocks threatens to hinder the recovery of stock markets, after the wave of selling witnessed last week following the Democrats' victory in the midterm elections.

Microsoft's Outlook, Teams, and CoPilot services were subjected to an outage on Friday, in one of the worst disruptions the company has ever witnessed. The outage lasted for more than 12 hours, disrupting communications for companies and governments around the world.

Microsoft shares fell by 2.6 percent in pre-market trading, making it the only loser among the shares of the “Great Seven” group, which includes major American technology companies.

On the other hand, Cerebras shares jumped by more than 16 percent, after the company specializing in chips and cloud computing raised its revenue expectations for the year 2026, and announced the signing of an agreement with Microsoft to become one of its clients.

The strong business results of some companies, at various times during the week, contributed to reducing the negative pressures that clouded the markets. According to Tajinder Dhillon, head of earnings and equity research at the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), the results of 83.6 percent of the 450 companies listed in the Standard & Poor's 500 index that announced their results as of Thursday exceeded analysts' expectations.

However, investors remain cautious about a range of risks, including geopolitical developments. Oil prices rose for the third session in a row, a day after US President Donald Trump said that the United States does not need to reach an agreement with Iran.

In the electronic chip sector, shares of a number of companies declined. AMD and Broadcom shares fell by more than 2.5 percent each.

Shares of cryptocurrency companies also fell; The shares of “Coinbase”, “Strategy”, and “Mara Holdings” fell by rates ranging between 2 and 2.6 percent, after the currency “Bitcoin” recorded its lowest levels in about three months.

Stocks fell in most European and Asian markets during Friday trading, but losses remained limited, at a time when investors are evaluating the repercussions of Jensen Huang’s resignation from his position as CEO of NVIDIA on the global artificial intelligence industry.

In a separate development, a widespread malfunction in Microsoft electronic services caused disruption to email accounts and a number of applications around the world, but its direct impact on the markets seemed limited, according to the Associated Press.

Microsoft said, in an update issued on Friday, that the malfunction affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 services related to Online Exchange and email services. Users reported disruptions to services including Outlook, Teams, and the AI-powered assistant CoPilot. US stock futures were largely stable.

In early European trading, the German DAX index fell by 0.1 percent to 26,748.60 points, and the French CAC 40 index fell by the same percentage to 8,353.98 points. The British FTSE 100 index fell 0.1 percent to 10,856.66 points.

In Asia, the Japanese Nikkei 225 index rose 0.5 percent to 61,142.35 points. The shares of Tokyo Electron, which specializes in chip manufacturing equipment, rose by 1.7 percent, while the shares of Kioxia Holdings, which manufactures memory chips, fell by 2.3 percent. The shares of SoftBank Group, an investor in OpenAI, also fell by 5.1 percent.

In South Korea, the benchmark KOSPI index fell by 1 percent to 5,290.53 points. The shares of Samsung Electronics, one of the largest South Korean companies by market value, fell by 1 percent, while the shares of SK Hynix, which specializes in manufacturing memory chips, fell by 3 percent.

On the other hand, the Taiwanese TAEX index rose by 1.4 percent, with the shares of TSMC, the largest chip manufacturer in Taiwan, rising by 0.4 percent.

The departure of Huang, who co-founded NVIDIA and was one of the most prominent architects of its pivotal role in the artificial intelligence boom, raised questions about the company's future. Its shares fell by 4 percent following the announcement of his resignation.

Huang's resignation came after the revelation of a romantic relationship he had with an executive at a Chinese technology company. Which raised concerns about American national security. The company's veteran CFO, Colette Cress, will serve as interim CEO.

“Nvidia” is one of the main pillars of the artificial intelligence boom, and competes with “Apple” for the title of the company with the highest market value on “Wall Street,” and has also invested heavily in other companies working in this field. Investors are awaiting the repercussions of its potential crisis on the upcoming initial public offerings of artificial intelligence companies, including the potential offering of Anthropic, whose value is estimated at about $1.3 trillion.

The stock prices of many Asian companies producing computer chips, servers, and other equipment used in artificial intelligence applications are closely linked to the pace of infrastructure development for this sector in the United States.

In other markets, the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong fell by 1.6 percent to 23,637.60 points, and the Shanghai Composite Index fell by 0.6 percent to 3,634.35 points.

The Australian Standard & Poor's ASX 200 index fell by 0.7 percent to 9,082.20 points, while the Indian Sensex index fell by 0.6 percent.

Wall Street indices ended Thursday's trading with a decline. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell by 0.4 percent, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by the same percentage, and the Nasdaq Composite Index, which is dominated by technology stocks, fell by 0.4 percent.

On the other hand, shares of some of Nvidia's competing companies rose, led by AMD, whose shares rose by 5.9 percent during Thursday's trading.

Pressure on stocks also came in light of the rise in oil prices, after US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that the United States “does not need an agreement with Iran,” despite the continuing conflict in the Middle East.

“We do not need an agreement with Iran,” Trump wrote in a social media post. Those days are long gone. “We got their money, hundreds of billions of dollars, and the strait is under our control.”

In early trading on Friday, Brent crude futures, the global benchmark for oil prices, rose 0.3 percent to $96.07 per barrel. Crude oil was trading near $72 a barrel in late February, before the outbreak of war with Iran.

Standard US crude futures also rose by 0.1 percent to $88.08 per barrel.

The repercussions of the global outage that struck Microsoft services continued on Friday, disrupting the work of companies and government institutions from Asia to the United States, amid ongoing attempts to restore full operation of email services, business applications, and artificial intelligence. The disruption included the services “Outlook,” “Teams,” and the artificial intelligence assistant “Copilot,” in addition to applications linked to the “Microsoft 365” platform, which organizations rely on to manage their communications and daily operations. The Down Detector website, which specializes in monitoring digital malfunctions, recorded more than 130,000 reports of problems in Outlook during the peak of the crisis, on Thursday, before the reports declined later, without this meaning that all services were restored normally. Microsoft announced that it is continuing to address the problem, after it acknowledged that some of the technical measures it took to improve the systems' performance did not achieve the expected results. The company confirmed that there are no indications that the malfunction resulted from a cyber attack, stressing that it is treating the incident as a top priority until services are fully restored, without announcing a final cause for the disturbance.

In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said that Microsoft officials likened the incident to the “Crowd Strike” failure in July 2024, which caused widespread disruption in the aviation, banking and hospital sectors, as a result of a defective software update. However, this analogy does not confirm that the causes of the two accidents are identical, especially since the technical investigations into the current malfunction have not been completed. The repercussions extended to commercial activities. The American industrial technology company Workhorse Group was forced to postpone a phone conference to discuss its quarterly results due to the outage of services.

In Hong Kong, Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum company, said that the disruption of Outlook accounts prevented his company from receiving updates from American customers, warning that the continuation of the problem may affect production schedules. This example highlights how email outages can turn into an economic problem, when they delay orders or disrupt coordination between suppliers and customers across borders.

In the aviation sector, Air India announced that its flight operations were not affected, but it temporarily switched email services to ensure continued reception of customer inquiries. Indian "IndiGo" also said that the malfunction affected email support services, while other communication channels and air operations remained operating normally.

The unrest affected government agencies. The Government Technology Agency in Singapore announced the disruption of email, while the Supreme Court in the Philippines confirmed that some of its operations, including electronic responses, were affected. In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said that the malfunction affected the government's information infrastructure, stressing that the authorities are monitoring developments in the crisis. The effects extended to the artificial intelligence sector, after the companies “OpenAI” and “Anthropic” reported problems connecting to “Microsoft 365” tools, which reflects the increasing interdependence between cloud platforms and smart applications.

Economically, there were no reliable estimates of the size of the total losses, but the disruption caused the postponement of meetings and the disruption of commercial communications and services to customers, with the possibility of higher operational costs if the interruption lasts for a long time. The crisis highlights the dangers of intense reliance on a single digital services provider, especially with the expansion of the use of cloud computing and artificial intelligence in vital sectors. During the coming hours, attention will focus on Microsoft's ability to restore full operation and determine the technical cause of the failure, while the incident is likely to prompt more organizations to review business continuity plans, strengthen alternative communication channels, and reduce the risks of stopping operations when cloud services fail.