On Wednesday, US markets saw significant movement in the tech sector, with memory and chip stocks broadly declining. The top-traded stock by volume was Micron Technology, which fell 10.07% to close with $51.6 billion in turnover, marking its third consecutive losing session. Nvidia dropped 3.55% to $275.23, recording losses in four of the last five trading days. SanDisk declined 7.32% with $24.62 billion in volume, extending its losing streak to four days and accumulating a total drop of 36.9% over that period.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) fell 5.51% on $13.9 billion in trade. Reports surfaced that AMD launched ROCm.ai to accelerate AI development on its platform. Additionally, sources indicated AMD confirmed a 4GB version of the Radeon RX 9050 graphics card is designed for partner systems, with no plans to sell it outside OEM channels. Unlike other down-tiered models with half the maximum memory, this 4GB version also features half the memory bus width of the 8GB variant, which is expected to cause severe theoretical performance degradation.
Intel slid 5.12% with $11.59 billion in volume. The company announced the completion of the US Department of Defense's RAMP-C program, which utilizes Intel's 18A process to help commercial and defense clients build chip design environments, conduct testing, and validate early product prototypes. This milestone sets the stage for Intel's entry into the Secure Enclave security manufacturing project.
Tesla declined 2.97% on $11.59 billion in turnover. Elon Musk stated on Tuesday that xAI's next-generation large model, Grok 4.6, is expected to launch around August 7, featuring 1.5 trillion parameters and significant improvements in supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). Musk added that Grok 4.7, with an estimated 2.1 trillion parameters, would follow weeks later, offering further enhancements in all areas but with slightly slower service speed and higher token efficiency.
Alphabet (Google) Class A shares rose 0.90% on $9.04 billion in trade. According to reports, Google DeepMind has disbanded the dedicated team that developed AlphaFold. Most researchers have been reassigned to projects like Gemini, AI coding, genomics, enzyme design, and nuclear fusion, while others have moved to Alphabet's AI drug discovery firm, Isomorphic Labs. Just two years after helping DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and project lead John Jumper win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the star team has been dissolved. Once a cross-disciplinary group of machine learning researchers, structural biologists, and engineers, the team lost its independent structure after completing AlphaFold 3, with members scattered across different projects within Google DeepMind. Google has not released a full list of changes or referred to the move as layoffs.
SK hynix fell 2.60% on $8.31 billion in volume. On July 29, the company released its first earnings report since its IPO, showing first-half operating profit surged over five times year-over-year but missed expectations, causing the stock to decline. Second-quarter revenue was 79.32 trillion won, with net profit of 93.92 trillion won, up 133% sequentially. The company noted that DRAM and NAND prices continued to rise, with HBM, AI server DRAM, and enterprise SSD sales driving record profitability. Despite market concerns about slowing AI investment, SK hynix believes demand will continue to expand and that short-term supply-demand imbalances are unlikely to improve significantly. Due to earlier production launches and expanded investment, 2026 capital expenditure is expected to exceed 40 trillion won. The company is progressing with M15X mass production and the Yongin cluster construction, emphasizing a balance between capturing growth opportunities and maintaining financial discipline.
TSMC dropped 4.50% on $8.08 billion in volume. The company stated that recovery at its Kumamoto wafer fab will take some time. After a magnitude 7 earthquake struck Japan's Kumamoto region on July 29, TSMC noted that local factory inspections and equipment calibration are expected to require a period. The company is currently checking equipment and working on restoration, with water, power, and safety systems operating normally. TSMC has allocated resources to support Japanese operations, and raw material supply continues. Post-earthquake checks confirmed the structural safety of the factory buildings. The company also confirmed that the construction site for the second fab was unaffected and resumed work after inspections.
Seagate Technology gained 2.29% on $7.15 billion in volume. Wedbush raised its price target for Seagate from $825 to $1,000.
Comments