Key points
- June CPI fell 0.4% on the month, the first monthly decline since 2020, bringing annual inflation to 3.5% against the 3.8% economists expected. Core came in at 2.6%, also cooler than forecast.
- IBM crashed about 23% after preliminary results missed on revenue and earnings, and the read-through hit enterprise software hard: Workday (WDAY) fell 6.6%, ServiceNow (NOW) 5.8%, Adobe (ADBE) 4.2%.
- Monday's chip losers bounced: AMD and Micron (MU) each gained about 4.1%. The exception was Arm (ARM), down another 3.9%.
- CleanSpark (CLSK) jumped 8% on a 20-year data center lease worth about $6.6 billion in contracted revenue with an unnamed investment-grade technology company.
- The Kospi closed up 0.7% hours before the CPI number even existed, led by Samsung up 3.3% and SK Hynix up 3.7%.
Tuesday packed a month of narrative into one morning. Inflation actually fell, the market's oldest tech company had one of the worst days in its history, yesterday's chip wreckage bounced, a bitcoin miner landed a multi-billion dollar AI tenant, and the selling that hammered semiconductors on Monday found a new home in enterprise software. Here is each piece, and the thread that ties them together.
The CPI number was better than anyone forecast
The June Consumer Price Index fell a seasonally adjusted 0.4% for the month, the first monthly decline since 2020, driven mostly by the roughly 10% drop in gasoline prices. Annual inflation came in at 3.5% against expectations of 3.8%, down from 4.2% in May. Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, was flat on the month and 2.6% for the year, also below the 2.9% forecast. Monday's setup piece framed this report as the coin flip that would decide the week. It landed about as market-friendly as it could have, and the index-level reaction followed: the Nasdaq 100 was up about 1% by mid-morning.
Then IBM detonated under the software sector
The relief rally had an asterisk by 9:30. IBM released preliminary second quarter numbers ahead of its scheduled report: revenue of $17.2 billion against a $17.86 billion consensus and adjusted earnings of $2.93 per share against $3.02 expected, with the weakness centered on its mainframe division and the transaction-processing software tied to it. The stock was down about 23% by 9:57am ET, from $290.23 to near $224, a loss of roughly $60 billion in market value.
The damage did not stay contained. Vital Knowledge analyst Adam Crisafulli wrote that "the IBM update will deliver a devastating blow to software/services stocks as investors will worry about the capex pivot negatively impacting the whole industry." The mechanism: memory and hardware prices are climbing as the AI buildout eats supply, so enterprise IT budgets are being redirected toward servers and storage before prices rise further, and the money has to come from somewhere. Somewhere is software subscriptions and services contracts. Workday fell 6.6%, ServiceNow 5.8%, Adobe 4.2%, Salesforce 3.4%, and Microsoft (MSFT) about 2% by mid-morning. Notably, the selling was selective: security and infrastructure software went the other way, with Palo Alto Networks up 4.4%, Cloudflare up 3.4%, and Datadog up 2.2%.
The same squeeze lifted the chip names
Flip that capex story around and you get Tuesday's winners. If enterprises are racing to buy hardware before memory gets more expensive, the companies selling the memory and the chips benefit. Micron gained about 4.1%, AMD about 4.1%, Coherent (COHR) 2.3%, Broadcom 1.4%, and Nvidia 0.7%, recovering a chunk of Monday's selloff. The exception was Arm, which fell another 3.9% on top of Monday's 7.5% drop, and Vertiv, down 1.4%. The bounce was real but it was not indiscriminate.
CleanSpark got its TeraWulf moment
CleanSpark, a bitcoin miner that has been pivoting toward AI data center hosting, jumped 8% after announcing a 20-year infrastructure lease at its Sandersville, Georgia campus with what it describes only as a high-investment grade global technology company. The deal covers 175 megawatts of IT load, is expected to generate about $6.6 billion in contracted revenue over the initial term, and comes with a letter of intent giving the same tenant exclusivity over CleanSpark's entire Texas portfolio, up to 885 megawatts more. Deliveries start in late 2027. The template is familiar: TeraWulf's 20-year Anthropic lease repriced that stock overnight in June. The divide between miners with signed AI tenants and miners still just mining showed up again Tuesday too: while CleanSpark rallied, TeraWulf (WULF) fell about 4.9% and Marathon slipped slightly.
Korea closed green before any of this happened
The Kospi finished Tuesday up 0.73% at 6,856.83, its first green close since the circuit-breaker crash, and it did it blind: Seoul's market closes six hours before the CPI number came out, a setup covered this morning when the index swung 3% in the first fifteen minutes. Samsung Electronics finished up 3.3% and SK Hynix up 3.7%, the same memory-squeeze logic that lifted Micron in New York. The smaller Kosdaq missed the party, closing down 1.9%.
US figures are intraday, taken between 9:55 and 9:57am ET on July 14, 2026, roughly 25 minutes into the session, and will move before the close. Korean figures are final closes. CPI data via the Bureau of Labor Statistics; IBM figures via its preliminary results.