News
Market news, earnings recaps, and daily moves in AI and semiconductor stocks.
Nasdaq futures up 0.6%, Kospi bounced back hard. Will it hold by Monday's open?
Nasdaq futures are up about 0.6% Sunday night and Kospi clawed back from a rough open. Here's what would need to hold, and what could break it, before Wall Street opens.
Korean funds are paying 25 percent extra to buy SK Hynix (SKHY) in New York
Eleven Korean active ETFs bought SK Hynix's US listing (SKHY) days after its Nasdaq debut, paying about 25 percent above the Seoul price. A fund rule explains why.
Kimi AI stopped taking new signups days after launch as GPU demand maxed out. Alphabet (GOOGL), Tesla (TSLA) and Intel (INTC) report into a chip bear market (week of July 20, 2026)
Moonshot paused new Kimi subscriptions three days after K3 launched because its GPUs hit capacity, which was our whole argument for chip stocks. This week: Alphabet, Tesla, Intel and Nokia earnings, $88 oil, and a Kospi reopen.
I gave five AIs a pretend $10,000 to pick 5 tech stocks. Four bought Nvidia (NVDA). Claude went rogue.
ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Meta AI and Claude each picked five tech stocks to hold for six months. Four bought Nvidia. Claude went the other way. Every pick is here and the scoreboard runs monthly.
SK Hynix's (SKHY) 'reverse kimchi premium': Americans now pay 25% more than Seoul for the same stock
SK Hynix's US shares (SKHY) closed Friday at $154.03, about 25% above the same company's price in Seoul. Korean media calls it the reverse kimchi premium. The difference reached 51% on July 14, and analysts say a premium this wide usually starts pulling the cheaper Seoul shares upward.
Memory stocks fell hard this week, from Micron (MU) to Western Digital (WDC). Sandisk (SNDK) lost 29%, and Goldman's price target says it should be 60% higher.
Sandisk (SNDK) fell 29% this week, the worst of a brutal stretch for memory stocks that also hit Micron (MU) and Western Digital (WDC). Two weeks ago Goldman Sachs raised its SNDK target to $2,200, more than 60% above Friday's close. Earnings on August 5 start settling the argument.
Ingenia Therapeutics is about to be the first foreign biotech to list in South Korea's Kosdaq in five years.
Boston biotech Ingenia Therapeutics is about to become the first foreign company to list on the Kosdaq in five years, with three more Korean-founded US biotechs lining up behind it. Korea's regulator says a NYSE-listed company has directly inquired too, ahead of a September investor roadshow.
New Mexico blocked the pipeline feeding Oracle's (ORCL) biggest Stargate site. Bloom Energy (BE) has 2.45 GW riding on it.
New Mexico's land commissioner denied the Green Chile gas pipeline for Oracle's Project Jupiter Stargate site a second time, and SemiAnalysis now sees a 1 to 2 year delay risk. That puts Bloom Energy's record 2.45 GW fuel cell order, and a $61 billion market cap built on AI power deals, on the clock.
Broadcom just picked its next supplier, and it is not Samsung Electronics or SK Hynix.
Samsung Electro-Mechanics and LG Innotek, not Samsung Electronics or SK Hynix, are racing to supply Broadcom with the substrates its AI chips sit on. One has already won Broadcom's business and is shipping glass substrate samples. The other is fielding trillion won investment offers to catch up.
Sivers Semiconductors (SIVEF) diluted shareholders by 11% in two days. Then its insider lockup expired.
Sivers Semiconductors (SIVEF) grew its share count by about 11% in two days in early July, between a SEK 700 million raise and a lender's debt-to-equity conversion. An insiders' lockup then expired July 16, and the stock, still without a rebuttal to short seller Ningi Research's claims, is down roughly 67% from its 52-week high.
Nebius (NBIS) tried a $1 billion customer deal and a new business model to stop its stock slide. A $775 million loan is what actually worked.
Nebius raised $775 million in its first-ever secured debt facility, backed by GPU infrastructure and contracted cash flows, without issuing new shares. The stock is up more than 5% today, defying a weak Nasdaq, after a $1 billion customer deal and a new partnership model both failed to stop a 22% five-day slide.
SK Hynix's own chairman had one message for panicking investors: stop trading, just hold. (July 17, 2026)
SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won told investors Friday to stop trading SK Hynix and just hold it, a day after the stock fell 11.5% in Seoul and its Nasdaq shares (SKHY) dropped another 13.7% overnight. By Friday afternoon, SKHY was already green, up more than 5% in New York trading.
Meta (META) is in talks to lease $10 billion of computing power to its rival Anthropic
The New York Times reports Meta is negotiating to lease AI rival Anthropic up to $10 billion in computing power, following the path SpaceX and TeraWulf already blazed.
Micron slid 6% into Friday's open, then flipped positive within the hour as chip stocks staged a violent rebound (July 17, 2026)
Chip stocks slid overnight and into Friday's open, with Micron down as much as 5.8 percent, then staged one of the sharpest reversals of the week within about an hour.
Kimi K3 just gave Nvidia (NVDA) its second "DeepSeek moment." The first one made chip demand go up, not down.
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 sent Nvidia and Oracle lower this week, reviving the "cheap AI kills chip demand" argument. History, and the actual spending numbers, say the opposite is true.
Korea triples the deposit to trade its riskiest leverage ETFs. FSS chief Lee Chan-jin wishes he had stopped them sooner.
Korea's regulators tripled the minimum cash deposit for single-stock leverage products on Samsung and SK Hynix and halted new listings, after the products drove 16 of this year's 37 Kospi trading halts since their May launch. The financial regulator's own chief already said in June he wishes he had stopped them before they launched.
Steven Cohen's Point72 bought into Evommune (EVMN). The stock had already crashed 38%.
Point72 disclosed a new 5.3% stake in Evommune (EVMN) today, more than two weeks after the stock crashed 38% on a failed Phase 2b trial. The filing doesn't say what Point72 paid or whether the position is up or down, but the stock has kept sliding since the disclosure date.
SharonAI (SHAZ) just signed a $1.32 billion cloud deal. The stock is down anyway.
SharonAI (SHAZ) signed a $1.32 billion, five-year cloud computing deal with an unnamed AI lab today, its first project in New Zealand, and the stock fell about 5.5% anyway. It's the same pattern that hit TSMC and Nebius on the same day: real good news, and the stock drops regardless.
Nebius (NBIS) signed a $1 billion deal this week. Its stock is down 14% today anyway, worse than the chipmakers.
Nebius signed a $1 billion, multi-year AI compute deal with Reflection AI, and its stock is still down about 14% today. The pressure has spread well past chips: CoreWeave, crypto miners like IREN and Cipher Mining, power stocks like Talen Energy and Vistra, and now New York's data-center moratorium and a Trump-Hochul clash are all weighing on the same trade.
SK Hynix (SKHY) and Samsung make almost 80% of the world's AI memory. That's why Micron (MU) and US chip stocks crashed again (July 16, 2026)
Chip stocks fell hard again on July 16: SK Hynix's US shares (SKHY) closed down 13.7%, SanDisk (SNDK) 12.6%, Western Digital (WDC) 9.2%, Micron (MU) 5.7%, even after TSMC's record quarter. The reason traces back to Korea, where Samsung and SK Hynix make close to 80% of the world's AI memory, and to China's CXMT pricing an $85.7 billion IPO the same day.
Jim Cramer blessed IBM on Monday. Tuesday was its worst day ever. Wednesday he blessed my Intel. Thursday it dropped.
Jim Cramer told viewers to buy IBM on July 13. It fell 25% the next day, the worst session in the company's history. Then he turned bearish at the bottom and has been right since. On Wednesday he called Intel his favorite stock for the fifth time since June. I own Intel. Thursday it dropped another 3.5%.
Pasqal hired a 30-year HPE executive to lead its commercial push, months into its $2 billion SPAC deal
Pasqal, the Nobel laureate's quantum computing startup, just hired a nearly 30-year HPE veteran to lead its commercial push across Europe and Asia. The hire comes months into the $2 billion SPAC merger it announced back in March, still working toward a close later this year.
TSMC beat earnings for a seventh straight quarter. The whole chip sector sold off anyway, and health care picked up the money.
TSMC beat Q2 earnings for a seventh straight quarter and raised its own 2026 capex forecast, an unusually bullish print. The semiconductor sector sold off anyway, continuing this week's memory-chip unwind, while health care, led by big earnings beats from UnitedHealth and Abbott, picked up the money instead.
Korea's president called the stock market unstable. Two days later, the Kospi crashed again (July 16, 2026)
South Korea's Kospi fell another 6.37% Thursday on a surprise Bank of Korea rate hike, two days after President Lee Jae-myung called the market unstable and blamed leveraged ETFs tracking Samsung and SK Hynix. The same week, regulators rolled out a new debt hotline after more than 320,000 accounts were forcibly liquidated this month.