Global equity markets sold off Tuesday in a session led by deep losses in semiconductors and the so-called Magnificent Seven, with South Korea's Kospi closing 10 percent lower, the Stoxx 600 Technology index falling 3 percent and Nasdaq 100 futures down 2.7 percent ahead of the New York open. SpaceX, whose 16 percent drop Monday wiped roughly $400 billion off its market value, extended its slide another 3 percent in pre-market trade as the rocket-and-AI company opened a senior unsecured notes offering disclosed alongside a $100.8 billion cash pile.

The rout is the sharpest test yet of the AI trade that has carried global equities for most of 2026, and it arrived on the same day SpaceX began marketing its first bonds since the largest initial public offering on record. The combination has forced investors to reprice two questions at once: whether the trillions of dollars in capital expenditure now committed to AI infrastructure can be earned back, and whether the companies leading that buildout can keep funding it with equity alone.

What shifted

The selling started in Asia. Samsung and SK Hynix, the two memory-chip suppliers most exposed to AI accelerator demand, each ended Seoul's session more than 12 percent lower, dragging the Kospi to its 10 percent loss. The pressure carried into Europe, where the Stoxx 600 shed about 1 percent after paring deeper morning losses. STMicroelectronics and the Dutch semiconductor-equipment maker ASMI were each down more than 7 percent, the biggest decliners on the regional benchmark.

In New York pre-market trading, the iShares Semiconductor ETF lost 6.2 percent. Intel slid 7.6 percent, Micron 8.5 percent, AMD 6.2 percent and Nvidia 3 percent. Amazon and Meta, both of which fell with the wider Magnificent Seven group on Monday, extended losses by just over 0.7 percent. Micron is scheduled to report earnings Wednesday, a print that Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said was amplifying nerves across the chip complex.

On the Street

Ives, who manages Wedbush's AI Revolution ETF and counts Micron, TSMC, ADM and Nvidia among its top holdings, framed the move as a buying opportunity rather than a regime change. "Clearly this [downturn] will cause selling pressure and white knuckles for tech stocks in the U.S. this morning as investors worry the overheated KOSPI sell-off has a spillover impact to U.S. tech stocks," he wrote in a Tuesday note. He added that the AI build cycle "remains in the 3rd inning."

Tom Hulick, chief executive of Strategy Asset Managers, told CNBC he was not bracing for a broader unwind. "I don't think we're anywhere near some type of catastrophic failure in the markets. There's too much liquidity out there, and the earnings momentum is very strong right now," Hulick said. He acknowledged that capital expenditure "in the trillions of dollars" can push valuations at companies including SpaceX and Anthropic into territory he called "a little stratospheric."

The bond debut

SpaceX disclosed Monday that it held $100.8 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of June 19 and launched a senior unsecured notes sale, its first bond offering since the June 12 IPO that briefly pushed its market capitalization past Amazon and Microsoft. The company closed Monday at a $2 trillion valuation, down from the roughly $3 trillion peak it touched in the week after the debut, when shares ran from a $135 offering price to an intraday high above $225.

Last Thursday, the five-day volume-weighted average price of the stock sat at $181.71, which CNBC reported left the average post-IPO buyer roughly at breakeven. Retail investors who received allocations at $135 through Robinhood, Fidelity and SoFi remained in profit, though many were allotted only a handful of shares.

The bond sale lands the same week SpaceX is leaning harder into the AI infrastructure story that helped justify its multitrillion-dollar debut. On Monday, the company disclosed a computing-power agreement with the open-source startup Reflection AI that calls for $150 million in monthly payments beginning July 1 and running through 2029, a contract worth roughly $6.3 billion if it goes the full term. Reflection, last valued at $25 billion, will get access to Nvidia GB300 chips inside SpaceX's Colossus data-center complex, the infrastructure originally built to train Elon Musk's Grok chatbot. The deal adds Reflection to a customer roster that already includes Anthropic, Google and Cursor, which SpaceX is acquiring.

"Recent events highlight how important open source is to the AI ecosystem, with more nations and enterprises recognizing the risks and costs associated with exclusively depending on closed models," a Reflection spokesperson said.

The counterpoint

All four sources informing today's report are wire-style market coverage from CNBC; no skeptical short-seller account, regulator response or macro-bear framing appeared in the body-tier reporting available by press time. The on-record cautions came from buy-side strategists and a sell-side analyst whose own fund holds the chip names in question, and both characterized the selloff as a positioning episode rather than a fundamental reassessment. The case that the AI buildout is structurally over-financed, advanced last week by some short-sellers as SpaceX briefly approached a $3 trillion market value, was not represented in Tuesday's wire coverage.

Micron reports after the bell Wednesday. The result, and the reception of SpaceX's new notes, will set the next test of how much of the AI trade investors are still willing to underwrite at this week's prices.