The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund lost NOK 636 billion ($68 billion) in investment income in the first quarter due to capital declines among major US tech companies. The S&P 500 posted its deepest quarterly decline since 2022. The fund slightly outperformed its benchmark.
Norges Bank Investment Management Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global (NBIM), the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund worth about $2.2 trillion, reported on Thursday a negative return of 1.9% for the first quarter of 2026, its first quarterly loss in four quarters.
The fund lost NOK 636 billion (about $68 billion) in investment income in the January-March period. It outperformed the benchmark index by 0.01 percentage points.
The total reported decline in fund value was NOK 1.27 trillion ($137 billion), a larger figure that includes the impact of currency movements: As the Norwegian krone strengthened against major currencies during the quarter, the value of the fund’s mostly foreign-denominated holdings fell further in krone terms when reversed.
“The result reflects a quarter with challenging market conditions” Deputy CEO Trond Grande made a statement. “We saw a limited impact on fixed income and real estate, but it was the decline in stocks, particularly among large US technology companies, that determined the bottom line.”
💜 of EU technology
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise founder Boris and some questionable AI art. Free in your inbox every week. Register now!
The fund holds about half of its assets in US markets and has major positions in technology companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta and Tesla.
US tech megacaps sold off sharply in Q1 2026, leaving the S&P 500 with its deepest quarterly decline since 2022. The geopolitical shock of the Iran war.
The United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against Iran at the end of February 2026. leads to continuous market sales it hit high-growth stocks the hardest.
Technology companies, which trade at high price-to-earnings ratios and are vulnerable to risk-off sentiment, rising rates and uncertainty about the economic outlook, bore the brunt.
Markets have since partially recovered, but closed with losses for the first quarter. In a white paper presented to the Storting in 2026, the Norwegian Ministry of Finance noted that the Iran war has pushed up oil prices while also lowering the value of the fund, an unusual combination for Norway, which is both a major oil producer and a major equity investor.
Norway’s oil revenues have historically supported the fund’s growth, but the fund is now so large that its performance is more sensitive to global equity markets than oil prices.
This quarter marked the second consecutive year that large US technology companies were the main cause of the fund’s quarterly loss. In Q1 2025, the fund also suffered losses from the tech sector, driven by the emergence of DeepSeek, which wiped $2.7 trillion from US tech megacaps in a matter of weeks.
The pattern highlights the structural concentration risk inherent in the fund’s equity portfolio: as the largest single shareholder of many of the world’s most valuable technology companies, NBIM’s quarterly performance is increasingly correlated with the performance of a small number of US tech stocks.
The fund itself holds around 1.5% of all listed stocks globally, making diversification in equity markets a real constraint rather than a simple choice.
Fixed income and real estate provided some buffer. BOMB’s fixed income portfolio and unlisted real estate holdings had a limited negative impact, in line with the Q1 pattern, where the sell-off was equity-specific and did not lead to broader exposure to credit markets.
The fund ended the first quarter worth $2.1-2.2 trillion, depending on the applicable dollar/krona exchange rate; The title “2.2 trillion dollars” expressed in dollars does not reflect the final value of the fund in the 1st quarter after the loss, but the volume on the last date.
