Overview
- The rout accelerated on Tuesday, July 28, 2026, when South Korea’s KOSPI plunged about 10–11 percent and heavyweight memory names led losses in Asia that rippled into U.S. markets.
- Investors cited three overlapping triggers for the sharp move: media reports of a Chinese firm making DUV lithography tools, press about large financing ties inside the AI ecosystem, and a leveraged unwind in Korea that magnified selling pressure.
- Major U.S. memory and storage names including Micron, SanDisk, Seagate, and Western Digital fell heavily in premarket and session trading and briefly pushed Nasdaq chip indices into correction territory.
- Company fundamentals diverge: Micron still reports large strategic customer agreements and a jump in remaining performance obligations with strong near‑term revenue guidance, but markets are repricing risk as demand durability is questioned.
- Traders and analysts say the next tests are clear: confirmed evidence on Chinese equipment and capacity, upcoming hyperscaler earnings and capex guidance, and near‑term memory price data that will show whether this is a reset or a deeper structural shift.