If you want to know how this earnings season is going to pan out for artificial-intelligence stocks, just look at Dell Technologies this week.
Dell shares surged 7.1% on Tuesday, buoyed by comments from IBM's chief executive about rising AI server investments. The stock then plummeted 12% Wednesday because of, well, something. The server maker doesn't report its own earnings until late August.
Dell's last two days are like the entire tech market's last three months in microcosm. A spectacular run for chip makers, server suppliers, and memory and storage names seems to have investors on edge, looking for signs of weakness or strength in even the most innocuous pieces of news.
That dynamic is affecting the whole sector. The iShares Semiconductor exchange-traded fund plunged 2.8% on Wednesday, a day after rising 2.6% on IBM's comments.
Analysts weren't positive about what caused Wednesday's weakness. For D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria, it was a story of whiplash. One day, investors are snapping up shares of the big AI suppliers and selling off shares of their customers. The next day, that trade unwinds or even reverses.
Meanwhile, Evercore ISI analyst Amit Daryanani, who covers both Dell and highflying memory stocks like Micron Technology, pointed to a Reuters report from Tuesday evening that said cloud-provider CoreWeave may use derivatives to hedge against a fall in future memory chip prices. Wall Street may have taken the report, which cited a source familiar with the matter, as a sign that memory prices are at their peak.
CoreWeave declined to comment.
To complicate matters further, Wednesday's selling spree began minutes after chip-equipment company ASML Holding finished its quarterly earnings call. ASML raised its sales guidance and is targeting a 30% jump in extreme ultraviolet lithography machines next year.
Perhaps investors worry more machines will reduce the supply crunch that is boosting chip prices. Why those worries would trickle down to Dell -- which has to buy expensive memory chips and central processing units -- is anyone's guess.
The one certainty is that hardware stocks have become extremely volatile. The iShares Semiconductor exchange-traded fund has a beta -- a common measure of volatility -- of 3.6 over the last 90 days, meaning it has been about 3.6 times more volatile than the broader market. That is double its five-year average, per FactSet.
Dell, which isn't in the semiconductor ETF, has also experienced a choppy few months. The stock has a beta of 2.5 over the last 90 days, up from a five-year average of 1.5.
If those big swings can happen on otherwise slow news days, don't expect things to get any calmer as earnings season heats up.
Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com
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July 15, 2026 15:10 ET (19:10 GMT)
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