FRANKFURT/NEW YORK (dpa-AFX) - After profit-taking in US technology stocks the day before, chip stocks also came under pressure here in Germany on Friday. "After a seven-day winning streak, the US technology index Nasdaq ran out of steam yesterday," said CMC Markets expert Jochen Stanzl. In Germany, Infineon shares fell by three percent and those of industry equipment supplier Aixtron by two percent.

US technology stocks had initially continued their rally the previous day, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 indices reaching all-time highs. "The subsequent declines seem to indicate nothing more significant than investors wanting to realize some of their gains," said equity analyst Sophie Lund-Yates of asset manager Hargreaves Lansdown.

Nvidia had to relinquish the recently conquered title of the world's most expensive company to Microsoft on Thursday: The shares of the artificial intelligence darling on the Nasdaq lost 3.5 percent to 130.78 US dollars. At the start of trading, they had cost more than 140 dollars for the first time since the recent stock split. On Friday, Nvidia's share price continued to fall.

The mood was also dampened on Friday by news from the chip industry. Traders pointed out that the US chip company Wolfspeed was postponing the construction of a plant in Germany until at least next year. According to a report by the Reuters news agency, the reason for this is that financing has not yet been clarified. The news points to a continuing weakness in demand from Wolfspeed's customers, the report continued. According to the report, the Group is suffering from a weakening market for electric cars.

According to a Borsianer, this allows negative conclusions to be drawn, especially for Aixtron, as the company generally benefits from the demand for machines for the production of silicon carbide semiconductors - and this more than the equipment manufacturer Süss Microtec, whose demand comes more from the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) sector. However, there had also been a different sector news item the day before, the trader noted in relief to the Wolfspeed story. According to this, the chip company On Semiconductor wants to invest billions in a plant in the Czech Republic./tih/gl/mis