RBA warns an AI stock correction could hit Australian household spending

Australia does not have a Nvidia. Australians, it turns out, own a fair slice of the AI trade anyway. The Reserve Bank of Australia is warning that a sharp drop in artificial intelligence stocks could weigh on the domestic economy. The channel is household wealth, and from there consumer spending. A paper from the RBA’s domestic markets division, released on September 1, 2026, estimates that Australian households hold approximately 5.4-5.5% of their financial wealth in AI-related stocks. Where the exposure sits According to the RBA paper, around 1.7 percentage points of that exposure comes from shares households hold directly. The larger portion, about 3.7 percentage points, sits inside superannuation funds, Australia’s compulsory retirement savings system. Nearly 90% of Australian households’ AI stock exposure is held in foreign markets, mostly US equities. That means a selloff on Wall Street would not stay on Wall Street. It would show up in Australian retirement balances, even if the local share market barely moved. What a 20% drop would do The RBA ran the numbers on a specific scenario: a permanent 20% decline in AI stock prices. In that case, the central bank projects a long-r...