Foreign portfolio managers staged the largest single-day exit from Taiwan’s stock market on record Wednesday, unloading NT$302.5 billion worth of shares as renewed anxiety about U.S. AI infrastructure lender CoreWeave spread through Taipei’s semiconductor-heavy benchmark. The wave drove the TAIEX through the 47,000-point level and helped push the Taiwan dollar down NT$0.192 to NT$32.265 against the U.S. dollar.
What moved the tape
Morning headlines in Taipei focused on CoreWeave, whose debt-funded expansion into GPU clusters has drawn scrutiny from U.S. lenders and short sellers. Even though the New Jersey company has limited direct revenue in Taiwan, traders treated its suppliers and AI-server assemblers as a sentiment proxy, selling anything tied to high-multiple cloud hardware.
Focus Taiwan’s survey of Friday’s front pages noted that foreign-exchange turnover also spiked, with interbank volume approaching US$9.1 billion as funds converted equity proceeds back into dollars. Local chip giants including TSMC fell with the broader AI basket, while financial shares slipped on fears that a weaker currency would raise hedging costs for insurers.
How locals read the rout
Retail investors who had chased AI momentum through the summer saw margin maintenance calls tick higher as the weighted index shed more than 1,600 points from recent highs. Securities firms said call volumes jumped at midday, with many clients asking whether the sell-off was a one-day flush or the start of a longer derating of AI exposures.
TSMC Chairman C.C. Wei told reporters on the sidelines of a technology forum that the company was still evaluating additional capacity in Texas and talking with startup TeraFab about a potential fab partnership, comments that briefly steadied some large-cap names but did not stop net foreign selling.
Options desks reported a jump in put buying on the Yuanta/P-shares AI ETF, and several foreign banks cut intraday margin ratios for clients holding triple-leveraged semiconductor notes. The Ministry of Economic Affairs said export orders for information-technology products remained strong in September, a datapoint bulls cited to argue the sell-off was positioning rather than fundamentals.
Still, the scale of Wednesday’s foreign exit dwarfed prior records set during the 2020 pandemic reopening and the 2022 U.S. rate-hike cycle, underscoring how concentrated global AI trades have become in Taipei’s liquidity pool.
What traders watch next
Currency desks will track whether the central bank smooths dollar demand at the NT$32.50 level, while chip analysts look to U.S. earnings from cloud and memory suppliers for proof that AI capital spending is still accelerating. Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission reminded brokerages to enforce credit limits, and several banks widened collateral haircuts on leveraged AI ETFs.
Unless CoreWeave’s financing picture stabilizes or U.S. futures rebound overnight, dealers expect foreign funds to keep trimming Taiwan’s crowded AI trade, making Friday’s opening auction a test of whether domestic buyers step in at these valuations.