Sector Update: Tech Stocks Fall Late Afternoon

() -- Tech stocks were lower late Thursday afternoon, with the State Street Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLK) falling 3.3% and the State Street SPDR S&P Semiconductor ETF (XSD) dropping 8%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor index slumped 6.6%. In corporate news, Apple (AAPL) plans to launch five new iPhone models to gain market share despite a memory shortage that is driving up prices, Nikkei Asia reported. Apple shares rose 4.5%. Nvidia (NVDA) said it is expanding access to its AI infrastructure by introducing a revenue-sharing model that grants token credits to developers in exchange for a portion of the recurring earnings from the cloud networks. Its shares fell 2.4%. Microsoft (MSFT) is combining the consumer and enterprise versions of its Copilot AI chatbots into a single application in an effort to better compete with Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT, The Information reported. Separately, Microsoft said Thursday it is launching Microsoft Frontier, a new operating business to provide frontier transformation services using AI. The company said it is investing $2.5 billion in Microsoft Frontier and embedding 6,000 employees at clients to co-design and deploy AI.