Chip stocks rose in early Monday trading, clawing back a slice of last week's steep losses as investors positioned ahead of a run of marquee earnings reports while lingering doubts about how the artificial-intelligence buildout is being financed kept trading choppy.
The iShares Semiconductor ETF, which tracks the sector, gained 2.4% after falling 11.8% over the prior week — its worst weekly performance since March. Intel and AMD each rose 2.6%, Micron added 1.8% and SanDisk climbed 2.6%. South Korea's Kospi, heavy with chipmakers, rose roughly 1% to 1.8% in Monday trading as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix also advanced.
The bounce comes after a brutal stretch for the sector. Memory-chip names in particular fell into a renewed slump this month, with SK Hynix down as much as 33% and SanDisk down nearly 28% from their September peaks before Monday's partial recovery, according to earlier tracking of the group. Micron, meanwhile, drew a mixed reaction after its board approved an additional $33 billion in stock buybacks on Oct. 8, lifting its total authorization to roughly $35.16 billion; the expanded program is set to begin Dec. 9.
Financing fears still hang over the sector
The selloff that preceded Monday's rebound was driven less by chip demand than by mounting worry over how data-center operators are paying for the AI race. Broadcom Chief Executive Hock Tan told a conference in Singapore earlier this month that access to capital, not chips or electricity, could become the industry's biggest constraint, and compared some AI investors to gamblers who "don't understand what they own." His comments came as banks began syndicating a roughly $60 billion financing package tied to Anthropic's lease of Google-designed chips, which includes about $42 billion in senior loans backed by Broadcom's credit.
Those worries boiled over on Oct. 14, when a spike in CoreWeave's unsecured bond yield to 15% triggered a selloff across AI infrastructure names: CoreWeave fell as much as 14.9% intraday and Nebius dropped 9.7%, dragging down Oracle and other companies tied to the debt-fueled data-center buildout.
Against that backdrop, investors are looking to this week's results from Tesla, Netflix and Meta Platforms for an early read on whether AI-related spending is translating into revenue. Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan told Nikkei the company is "80% done" with its restructuring and pointed to AI chip packaging and custom chips, or ASICs, as growth areas, while cautioning that reviving Intel's foundry business "takes time." Intel also unveiled a new data-center GPU, the D-series, at the Open Compute Project Global Summit, with up to 480 gigabytes of memory — more than Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra B300, which tops out at 288 gigabytes.
Retail sentiment tracked by Stocktwits turned more bullish on the semiconductor ETF and on Micron and SanDisk over the past week, though sentiment on Intel itself stayed bearish. One trader cautioned against chasing the rebound until the ETF breaks back above last week's high.
