The year in review: The Australian share market is a tale of two halves
As the financial year comes to a close, the ASX closes on a positive note
2 min
The benchmark index of the Australian share market, the ASX 200, is up by 7.72 percent at 7,759.6 points in the financial year-to-date as the final day of trading gets underway. Following a positive trading session on Wall Street overnight, the ASX 200 was expected to open higher today.
FY24 has been a tale of two halves, with the ASX 200 drifting down from July to October and hitting a 52-week low of 6,751.3 points on 30 October. A rally began in November as speculation of interest rate cuts in the United States and Australia began following substantial falls in inflation and growing excitement over artificial intelligence and its potential to meaningfully raise productivity worldwide.
The ASX 200 ascended to an all-time high of 7,910.5 points in April, following new records also set in the United States for the S&P 500 and NASDAQ Composite indexes at the time (these US market records have since been superseded). The S&P 500 and NASDAQ Composite have outperformed the Australian share market by more than 3:1 in FY24. The S&P 500 is up 23.2 percent and the NASDAQ is up 29.5 percent in the financial year-to-date.
Powering the NASDAQ’s performance has been the ‘Magnificent Seven’ stocks of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Tesla. Nvidia is the leader of the pack for share price growth, having revolutionised the global IT industry with its graphics processing units (GPUs) that accelerate computing and have become essential in supporting artificial intelligence. Its GPU chips power programs like ChatGPT. Nvidia stock is up 193 percent in FY24 due to sensational earnings growth.
On the ASX 200, the stocks that have risen the most over FY24 are cancer radiopharmaceutical company Clarity Pharmaceuticals (up 624 percent), buy now, pay later provider Zip Co (up 265 percent), social networking app developer Life360 (up 113 percent), medical imaging software developer Pro Medicus (up 113 percent) and gold miner Red 5 (up 95 percent).
All of the ASX 200 bank shares except Bank of Queensland hit multi-year high share prices in FY24, with National Australia Bank leading the pack with a 37 percent gain. Top broker Goldman Sachs has described Australian banks as the most expensive bank stocks in the world and “in uncharted valuation territory” at today’s share prices. This week, the Commonwealth Bank came very close to overtaking mining behemoth BHP as Australia’s most valuable company by market capitalisation, after reaching a 52-week high of $128.68per share on Tuesday.
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Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
4 minA sharp technology sell-off has exposed a new anxiety on global markets: whether the enormous borrowing behind the artificial-intelligence infrastructure boom can generate sufficient returns as interest rates rise and Chinese competition intensifies.
The artificial-intelligence investment boom has powered technology shares, semiconductor manufacturers and data-centre operators to extraordinary heights. Last week, investors were given a reminder that much of this expansion is being built with borrowed money.
The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 4.5 per cent over the week ended October 16, its weakest performance since late June. Semiconductor shares suffered an even deeper correction, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index losing about 11.4 per cent.
The selling spread quickly through global markets. Micron Technology fell 14.6 per cent over the week, while South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix dropped approximately 18 per cent and 24 per cent respectively.
This was more than a routine bout of profit-taking. Investors were reassessing three interconnected risks: higher interest rates, the rapidly expanding debt burden attached to AI infrastructure and the prospect of stronger competition from Chinese memory-chip manufacturers.
The debt behind the AI build-out
Artificial intelligence requires a physical infrastructure network of enormous scale. Data centres must be built, advanced processors purchased, power supplies secured and cooling systems installed before customers begin generating meaningful revenue from them.
Technology companies are increasingly supplementing their own cash with corporate bonds, syndicated loans, equipment leases, private credit and project-level financing.
JPMorgan describes the emerging funding model as a combination of conventional corporate borrowing and project finance tied to individual data-centre assets. In Australia, the Reserve Bank estimates that syndicated loans accounted for approximately three-quarters of data-centre financing during 2025 and 2026 to date.
The numbers are becoming large enough to affect broader credit markets. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has cited Wall Street estimates suggesting AI-related investment-grade bond issuance could approach US$300 billion in 2026 alone.
That borrowing is not automatically problematic. Debt can be an efficient way to finance long-lived infrastructure when future revenue is sufficiently predictable. The concern is that AI technology, customer demand and computing economics are changing much faster than the repayment schedules attached to the assets.
A data centre financed today may carry debt for years. Investors must therefore make assumptions about future utilisation rates, electricity prices, chip performance, customer concentration and the amount businesses will ultimately pay for AI computing.
When interest rates rise, those assumptions become less forgiving.
Inflation changes the calculation
September’s US inflation data intensified the pressure. Consumer prices increased 3.7 per cent over the year, ahead of market expectations and up from 3.4 per cent in August.
The hotter reading reduced confidence that interest rates would fall quickly and pushed bond yields higher. That matters particularly for companies whose valuations depend on profits expected well into the future, as well as highly leveraged infrastructure operators that may need to refinance.
CoreWeave has emerged as a closely watched test case. The specialist cloud-computing company has accumulated substantial debt and lease obligations to build AI capacity, while relying on a concentrated group of large technology customers.
Its shares fell sharply during the sell-off, while the cost of insuring its debt against default climbed. CoreWeave has argued that its contracted backlog more than covers its obligations and that financial markets do not always understand its business model. Nevertheless, its securities have become a proxy for investor confidence in debt-funded AI infrastructure.
Oracle, another major investor in AI computing capacity, fell 8.8 per cent in Friday trading, while CoreWeave dropped 15.5 per cent.
The question is shifting from how much AI infrastructure can be built to how profitably it can be operated.
China adds another source of pressure
Interest rates were not the only catalyst. Reports of advances by Chinese memory-chip producer ChangXin Memory Technologies raised concerns that lower-cost Chinese products could increase competition across the global semiconductor industry.
Memory chips are essential to AI systems, but the industry is historically cyclical. Periods of tight supply and high pricing can encourage rapid investment, eventually producing oversupply and falling margins.
The prospect of a well-funded Chinese competitor expanding its technological capabilities unsettled investors in Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. It also demonstrated that AI-related demand does not insulate chipmakers from conventional competitive pressures.
That combination—slower rate cuts, more expensive financing and potentially cheaper supply—challenged the assumption that every company exposed to AI would enjoy continually expanding margins.
A reset rather than the end of the boom
The sell-off does not establish that the AI boom is ending. Demand for computing power remains strong, the largest technology companies continue to generate formidable cash flows and many infrastructure projects are backed by long-term customer contracts.
What has changed is the market’s willingness to overlook the price and financing structure of that growth.
The most resilient companies are likely to be those able to fund investment from operating cash flow, secure long-duration customers and demonstrate that new capacity will earn returns comfortably above its financing costs.
More speculative operators may face greater scrutiny, particularly where debt is expensive, customers are concentrated or expected revenue depends on demand that has not yet materialised.
For Australian investors, the lesson extends beyond US technology shares. Local data-centre operators, infrastructure funds, electricity suppliers and property groups are increasingly exposed to the same investment cycle.
Artificial intelligence may remain one of the defining growth themes of the decade. But last week’s correction showed that enthusiasm for the technology does not eliminate financial discipline.
The next stage of the AI boom will be judged not only by computing power, model performance or demand for chips, but by something more traditional: whether the assets being financed can generate enough cash to repay the money borrowed to build them.
Fact box
Nasdaq Composite: Down 4.5 per cent for the week ended October 16, 2026
Philadelphia Semiconductor Index: Down approximately 11.4 per cent
Micron Technology: Down approximately 14.6 per cent
Samsung Electronics: Down approximately 18 per cent
SK Hynix: Down approximately 24 per cent
US September inflation: 3.7 per cent annually
Estimated 2026 AI-related investment-grade issuance: Approximately US$300 billion
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