The new US import ban covers cotton, tomatoes, and the capacitor supply chain behind AI servers
DHS added 43 Chinese companies to the UFLPA Entity List on July 31, 2026. Two of them sit in the aluminum electrolytic capacitor chain, the parts that fill AI server power supplies. Nichicon and Nippon Chemi-Con had already raised prices in June, citing aluminum foil costs.
Tesla (TSLA) and Alphabet (GOOGL) are falling hard. The rest of the AI trade isn't (July 23, 2026)
Tesla and Alphabet kept falling through Thursday morning even as chipmakers, neoclouds and photonics stocks held up fine. Oil topped $100 a barrel after Trump threatened to bomb Iranian infrastructure over any new attack on shipping.
Super Micro's (SMCI) revenue landed at the low end of guidance. The stock is up 25% anyway (July 22, 2026)
Super Micro Computer's preliminary Q4 update showed more than $60 billion of new orders and gross margin guidance that nearly doubled, but revenue landed at the low end of its own range. The stock is up about 25% anyway.
Nasdaq-100 futures sank close to 1% Wednesday morning. Stocks clawed almost all of it back by mid-morning (July 22, 2026)
Nasdaq-100 futures fell close to 1% Wednesday morning on an Iran oil spike, new tariffs and chip-stock fear. Stocks opened lower too, but climbed steadily through the first half hour of trading and were back to nearly flat by mid-morning.
Micron (MU), SK Hynix and AMD just gave chip stocks their first back-to-back gain in two weeks (July 21, 2026)
Micron (MU) closed up about 12 percent, SK Hynix's ADR about 14 percent, and AMD 8 percent Tuesday, chip stocks' first back-to-back gain in two weeks. A Bank of America upgrade on memory demand and a new AMD-Microsoft Azure deal did the heavy lifting.
Meta said it had spare compute. Then it broke ground on a $9 billion data center in Canada (META, CRWV, NBIS)
A week after Meta's excess-compute cloud plan crushed the neoclouds, it broke ground on a C$13 billion, 1-gigawatt data center in Alberta, Canada. The demand is real.
Chips had their third worst day of 2026 and the S&P barely noticed (MU, INTC)
The S&P 500 closed within a whisker of flat on July 1 and the chip trade still had its third worst day of the year. Micron fell 10.5 percent, Intel lost 9 percent, and Meta gained almost 9 percent on the other side. Here is the damage report.
The AI stocks that led and lagged the first half of 2026
The first half of 2026 split the AI trade in two. Memory and chip-supply names like Micron (MU, +304%) and Intel (INTC, +278%) soared, while marquee names lagged and AI software fell, with Palantir (PLTR) down about 34%. Here is the full scoreboard and what it means.
AI's quiet winners: ASML, AMD and Vertiv VRT lead at the June 30, 2026 open
On the last trading day of the first half, the AI suppliers led again. ASML, Arm (ARM) and Vertiv (VRT) each rose about 4%, while Micron (MU) is up roughly 300% in 2026.
The AI stock map: every layer of the trade, from sand to software
A top-to-bottom deep dive on the AI supply chain, from the machines that make the chips down to the hyperscalers writing the checks, and how every layer pushes and pulls on the others.