China’s chipmakers trigger bloodbath in global tech stocks

Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today:

Fortune Global 500: See the new ranking here. 

Exclusive: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on how he built the largest company in the world.

Markets: China’s CXMT wipes the floor with rival chipmakers.

White House currently favoring jaw-jaw over war-war in Iran.

Cities ranked by the cost of public transport.

Gas: We’re running out of it. 

The ‘AI doom loop’ of slop job applications.

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Jeff Bezos on how his garage startup became the largest company in the world

Jeff Bezos won’t pretend he didn’t see this day coming. Sure, when he was sitting in his Bellevue, Washington, garage in 1995, at a makeshift desk made from a wooden door, he probably wasn’t imagining that his nascent online bookshop would grow into the largest company in the world. Instead, he may have been puzzling over how to set up extension cords to keep his computers and servers running without tripping his home’s circuit breakers. Or he may have been mulling over changing the name of his tiny startup, then called Cadabra, to Amazon.

And anyhow, Bezos said, sitting at that original door-desk in his study in Washington, D.C., bigness was never the point. “I don’t want us to take pride in being big,” Bezos told Fortune. “I want us to take pride in servicing customers. And it turns out, if you service customers really well, that will drive growth.” 

See the Fortune Global 500 here:

The corporations on our annual list of the world's 500 largest companies generated $43.1 trillion in combined revenue in 2025, up 3.2% from the previous year. Together, they employ 70.2 million people, and their revenue represents more than one-third of the world’s GDP. The Global 500 earned $3.39 trillion in profit in its most profitable year ever. Amazon overtook Walmart at the top of the list this year, ending the latter’s 12-year run.

But perhaps the real story is the rise inside the Fortune 500 of chipmakers like Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor, and Chinese companies like Tencent and Alibaba. Fortune subscribers get early access to the full list.

China’s CXMT wipes the floor with rival chipmakers

U.S. futures were down only marginally prior to the open in New York after European markets eked out some gains, perhaps signaling a pause in the collapse of semiconductor stocks globally that we’ve seen over the last 24 hours. 

Dutch chipmaker ASML declined 5.80% yesterday and is down another 3.48% in overnight trading, after CXMT debuted on the stock market in China. Micron, Intel, and TSMC all took hits as well. CXMT also gave up 4% today—but that came after a runup of nearly 500% yesterday. On South Korea’s highly volatile KOSPI, SK........

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