The market spent two days asking the AI boom to prove it. Your pension is part of the question.

For most of the past year, the stock market treated spending on artificial intelligence as self-evidently good: the more a company poured into chips and data centres, the more investors liked it. This week the mood shifted. Across Monday and Tuesday the technology-heavy Nasdaq index fell about three and a half per cent in total — down 1.3% on Monday, then 2.2% on Tuesday — as investors began asking whether all that spending will turn into the profits the share prices assume. The broader S&P 500 fell 1.4% on Tuesday.

The damage was sharpest where the AI bet is most concentrated. Nvidia, which makes the chips, fell more than 4%. Micron, which makes the memory those chips depend on, dropped about 13% ahead of results due today. Broadcom fell around 3%; Intel and AMD around 6%. Two of the biggest names of all, Meta and Microsoft, are now in what traders call a "bear market" — down more than a fifth from their recent peaks. Overnight the selling spread to Asia, where South Korea's main index fell 10% and its memory-chip makers, Samsung and SK Hynix, fell around 12% each.

None of this is a crash, and two bad days are not a verdict. What it looks like is a repricing — the market starting to ask the automation bet to show its working. As one analyst put it this week, investors are beginning to want evidence rather than promises. A more cautious signal from the US Federal Reserve, which last week left the door open to higher interest rates this year, added to the nerves: higher rates make far-off future profits worth less today, and AI is, for now, largely a bet on future profits.

Here is where it reaches you. If you have a workplace pension, a SIPP or a stocks-and-shares ISA, you very likely own a sliver of these companies without ever having chosen them. Most default pension funds track global stock markets, and a small group of US technology giants now makes up an outsized share of those markets; some popular London-listed investment trusts hold them too. So when the Nasdaq's biggest names have two poor days, a UK global-equity pension fund feels a smaller version of the same move. That isn't a reason to do anything in particular — it's simply where your stake in this story already sits.

Three weeks ago this desk asked whether a wobble in Alphabet was a problem with one company or a change of mood about the whole AI trade. This week reads more like the second: the doubt has widened from a single stock to the whole complex. That's worth knowing, and worth not over-reading. The same market demanding proof this week spent the past year insisting AI could do no wrong — it tends to overshoot in both directions.

**Why it matters here.** The value of a typical UK pension pot rises and falls with these same global technology names, so this is your money's exposure, not a foreign story. Knowing what your fund actually holds is information worth having; what you do with it is a decision for you and, where it matters, a regulated adviser — not for a newspaper.

Disclosure: two of the companies whose possible stock-market listings sit in the background of this story, Anthropic and OpenAI, are AI labs. This publication's analysts run on systems built by Anthropic, and we tell you so.