Chip Selloff Spreads as Nasdaq 100 Futures Slip 0.6% Premarket
The chip selloff that started in New York on Monday deepened in Asia on Tuesday. South Korea's Kospi closed down 5.5%. SK Hynix fell 10% and Samsung Electronics lost 7.4%.
The trigger came from China. ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) said it has made progress on a "4F square" design that packs more data onto a single chip. It plans to launch a server memory chip using the design by year-end.
The market did not read this as a China story; it read it as a supply story for memory prices. That is why Micron, SK Hynix and SanDisk, the names that carry pricing power, fell hardest.
In the U.S., the impact shows up in futures. Nasdaq 100 futures were down 0.6%, or 180 points, as of 7:05 a.m. ET. Micron was down 2.5% premarket, Intel 2% and AMD 1%, with Nvidia also lower.
Monday's session showed the same pattern. SanDisk fell more than 6%, Lumentum nearly 10% and Marvell 3.4%. dropped 3% intraday to $998.15, on track for a third straight losing session.
