World's largest sovereign wealth fund posts loss over tech sell-off

ISTANBUL

Norway’s Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, announced Thursday a first-quarter loss of 415 billion kroner ($40 billion), highlighting difficulties in the tech sector.

“The quarter has been impacted by significant market fluctuations. Our equity investments had a negative return, largely driven by the tech sector," said Norges CEO Nicolai Tangen.

The fund's value reached 18.53 trillion kroner ($1.78 trillion) at the end of the first quarter, down 1.6%.

Due in major part to unfavorable currency fluctuations, the fund's market value dropped by 1.22 trillion kroner ($117.3 billion) during the first quarter.

“The krone strengthened against several of the main currencies during the quarter. The currency movements contributed to a decrease in the fund’s value of 879 billion kroner ($84.3 billion),” he said.

The fund is managed by NBIM on behalf of the people of Norway. Established in the 1990s to allocate surplus earnings from Norway's oil and gas sector, the fund presently makes investments in over 8,600 businesses in 63 nations.

The fund has stakes in American tech giants, including Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla, Meta, and Alphabet. The tech sector's megacaps saw a three-week sell-off of in March that saw $2.7 trillion depleted from their market value due to growing concerns about the effects of US President Donald Trump's tariff plans.

The decline came after a tech sell-off in January that was sparked by the release of an AI model created by DeepSeek, a company based in China.

The startup claimed to have created its huge language model at a fraction of the price of its top American competitors, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, causing heavy losses for businesses like AI giant Nvidia.