Dip Buyers Lift AMD, Micron After the Chip Index’s 11% Rout

US chip stocks rose at the open on Monday, 19 October 2026, after what Reuters called the steepest weekly selloff in months. By about 13:53 UTC, AMD was up +4.0% and Micron +4.3%, and the PHLX Semiconductor index was up +2.5%, by our arithmetic from Yahoo Finance prices, after the index fell 11.4% last week.

By our arithmetic from the same prices, that bounce had won back about 19% of the index’s drop from the 9 October close to the 16 October close. CoreWeave and Nebius, which each fell 25.2% last week, had won back less than a tenth of it.

Business Pill · CAPEX

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What Moved at the Open

Reuters reported before the open that the iShares Semiconductor ETF “climbed 3.6% in premarket trading after falling almost 12% last week.” It said US chip stocks “recovered some ground on Monday, bouncing after a bruising selloff last week as lower Treasury yields and easing crude oil prices offered some support to the recently battered AI trade.”

Reuters wrote that J.P.Morgan “upgraded its rating on Intel to “neutral” from “underweight”, citing future positive earnings revisions on agentic AI demand and chip scarcity”. Intel was up +5.1% at about 13:53 UTC, the largest move among the names we tracked.

At the close: the Nasdaq 100 finished up 1.2%%, the S&P 500 up 0.4%% and the chip index up 1.6%%, with Micron up 3.0%%, Intel 2.4%% and AMD 1.8%%, while CoreWeave slipped 0.4%%, by our check of Yahoo Finance closing data; the chip index and Intel gave back part of their intraday gains shown above.

What Was Posted on X

CNBC shared its Morning Squawk newsletter, published at 12:00 UTC, on X at 12:12 UTC, before the open, under the line that investors were buying on Monday despite fears for the AI trade. The newsletter is one of this piece’s sources; it said the bounce looked set to regain only some of last week’s losses.

Bloomberg posted at 12:00 UTC that US stock futures were rebounding from the Nasdaq 100’s worst week since April 2025, with chip stocks and CoreWeave rising before the bell. We cite the post as Bloomberg’s framing and have not read the article behind it.

The FirstSquawk wire account posted at 00:36 UTC on 20 October that Asian stocks fell 0.3% despite the Wall Street rebound, with South Korea leading declines as investors stayed cautious over AI spending and higher interest rates. We cite it for the regional picture in the 20 October Update.

Last Week’s Drop, Name by Name

The table below sets Monday’s early move against last week’s change for the chip and AI-infrastructure names we follow.

Yahoo Finance prices: closes on Friday 9 October and Friday 16 October 2026, and Monday’s price at about 13:53 UTC. The percentage changes and the share of last week’s drop won back are our arithmetic. Intraday prices change through the session.

How Bad Last Week Was

Reuters wrote that “The Philadelphia chip index dropped 11.4% last week, marking its biggest weekly decline since March 2025”, and that “The index had fallen for eight straight sessions as of last close, wiping out about $2 trillion in market value during the rout”.

It put the causes this way: “Hot inflation raising the odds of Fed rate hikes and doubts about high AI-spending paying off weighed on tech stocks last week”. It also noted that “Despite recent losses, the Philadelphia chips index is up 57.2% so far this year”.

The Neoclouds Lag

CNBC’s Morning Squawk said before the open that “CoreWeave is set to open higher by around 3%, but that doesn’t put much of a dent in the 25% drop from last week.” It added: “It’s a similar picture for Nebius which is also seen opening higher after losing the same amount as its neocloud peer.”

CNBC also reported that Goldman Sachs “upgraded the neocloud stock to buy from neutral” and trimmed its CoreWeave price target “to $106 from $139”. It quoted analyst Gabriela Borges: “Not all neoclouds are created equal, and we view CoreWeave as being toward the top of the quality rankings in the ecosystem”.

Buying the Dip, With a Caveat

CNBC wrote that “The buyers are ready to get back into technology stocks”, and that the move “looks set to regain only some of the losses from last week, which saw cracks emerge in the AI boom, sending the tech-heavy index down 4.5%.”

It also struck a note of caution: “While some investors are choosing to see the buying opportunity, others are taking these gains and still rotating out of tech.”

The Week Ahead

Reuters noted that “Megacap tech stocks Meta Platforms, Tesla and SpaceX are also set to report earnings this week”, along with Lam Research, Texas Instruments and Western Digital. Meta’s investor relations notice puts its results after the market close on Wednesday, 21 October.

Update, 19 October: The Gartner Forecaster CNBC Links to Last Week’s Rout

Gartner is standing by the forecast it issued on 14 October, CNBC reported on Monday. The firm’s chief forecaster, John Lovelock, told CNBC that returns are not yet backing up the full scale of investment: “At the moment, we have more compute capacity than we have demand, and we have a lot of the tokens and processing power being given away in freemium solutions.” He added that “Pretty much every market that Gartner is tracking in our AI race is likely to collapse down to a duopoly,” and said neoclouds would not be going out of business en masse but could be subject to consolidation, such as takeovers and mergers.

CNBC wrote that Gartner’s forecast “helped send shockwaves through the AI trade” last week, and cited a client note saying the market “appeared to already be on edge when a report from Gartner dropped.” The release itself, which we covered on 15 October, said more than $3.5 trillion of AI infrastructure spending could be exposed to impairment by the end of 2030 if AI providers continue their current pace of capital spending, and predicted that over 80% of neocloud providers will cease independent operations by 2030. CNBC reported CoreWeave up about 2%, Nebius up 3.3% and IREN up 5.6% in midday trading on Monday, after falls of 25%, 25% and 16% last week.

Goldman Sachs data showed hedge funds reduced their positions in tech stocks by the largest proportion in its prime-desk records, which go back to 2016, in the five trading sessions through 15 October (via Bloomberg). Net allocation to the sector, at 23.5% of Goldman’s global prime book, remained in the 90th percentile versus the past five years, while net leverage fell to a one-year low of 48.6%, according to the note.

CNBC shared its interview with Gartner’s chief forecaster on X on 19 October under the headline “Gartner analyst behind tech rout: AI returns are not yet large enough to justify neocloud build-out.” The “behind tech rout” framing is CNBC’s.

Update, 20 October: Asia Did Not Follow the Rebound

Seoul went the other way on Tuesday morning. Yonhap reported that the KOSPI, after opening 0.6 percent lower, fell 130.58 points, or 2.26 percent, to 5,637.43 as of 9:15 a.m. local time (00:15 UTC), “bucking overnight gains on Wall Street.” The news agency said shares were weighed down by tech heavyweights “amid woes over investments in the artificial intelligence (AI) value chain.”

Per Yonhap, SK hynix declined 4.07 percent and Samsung Electronics gave up 1.38 percent at that point. Yonhap said the index had plunged a combined 20.7 percent over seven trading sessions from 6 October to last Thursday, before rising for two sessions. Across the region, the FirstSquawk wire account posted at 00:36 UTC that Asian stocks fell 0.3 percent despite the Wall Street rebound, with South Korea leading declines.

Tokyo was lower as well. A Wall Street Journal markets report published at 00:50 UTC on 20 October ran under the headline “Nikkei Falls Amid Lingering Worry Over AI Boom Amid Elevated Bond Yields.” We could not read the article behind the headline, so we cite only its framing and not any index level.

Maeil Business Newspaper’s Pulse reported on 20 October that JPMorgan’s Korea equity strategy team estimated the Kospi’s forward price-to-earnings ratio had fallen to around 4, a historic low, and 8.4 excluding memory-related stocks, but that the bank had found “no convincing evidence in market flows that the Kospi had reached a bottom.” Per Pulse, JPMorgan said share buybacks by Samsung Electronics and SK hynix “have ended, weakening a source of buying support,” while foreign investors continue to withdraw. Bloomberg reported on 30 September that the two companies had planned to buy back a combined 55 trillion won ($40.5 billion) of their own shares and that, at the pace then, the buying “could be over by mid-October — about a month earlier than planned.” JPMorgan, as summarised by the @amitisinvesting account on X, said that, unlike in July, “retail investors have shown little appetite to buy the dip” and that short interest remains relatively low; we have not seen JPMorgan’s research itself.

As we read it, Monday’s bounce in AMD and Micron did not carry into the Korean memory names at Tuesday’s open. These are intraday figures from the first minutes of trading and can move before the close.

The Structural Read

As we read it, the bounce is uneven along the stack: chipmakers such as AMD, Micron and Intel had won back a quarter or more of last week’s drop, while CoreWeave and Nebius, which rent out the chips, had won back under a tenth. Our piece on AI-infrastructure IPOs tracks the same pressure on neocloud valuations.

As we read it, the causes Reuters gives for last week, hot inflation and doubts about AI spending paying off, are the same questions this week’s results will test: Meta reports on Wednesday, and Reuters lists Tesla and SpaceX for this week too. Our piece on Amazon’s Trainium software covers another front in the chip contest.

As we read it, Goldman’s CoreWeave note shows how analysts are sorting the neoclouds after the drop: it raised its rating while cutting its price target to $106 from $139, according to CNBC.

Three Implications

A PARTIAL BOUNCE SO FAR By our arithmetic, the chip index had won back about 19% of last week’s drop by 13:53 UTC on Monday.

NEOCLOUDS TRAIL THE CHIPMAKERS CoreWeave and Nebius each fell 25.2% last week and had won back 6% and 9% of it, by our arithmetic.

EARNINGS ARE THE NEXT TEST Reuters lists Meta, Tesla and SpaceX among the companies reporting this week.

The Business Engineer Lens

This story maps onto the Business Engineer framework The AI Capex Map.

The framework puts it this way: “This piece is about the financing. How the money flows, where it cracks, what it buys, who can absorb it, and what happens when revenue can’t catch up.”

As we read it, Monday’s uneven bounce maps onto that question of who can absorb the cost: of the names we track, CoreWeave had won back the least of last week’s drop, 6% by our arithmetic. The framework was published in May 2026 and does not discuss this week’s trading.

What Is Not Established

These are intraday prices from early in Monday’s session, not closing prices. The sources do not establish whether the bounce will hold, and none of them attributes Monday’s move to a single cause; Reuters cites lower Treasury yields and easing oil prices. The share of last week’s drop won back is our arithmetic from Yahoo Finance prices, not a figure from Reuters or CNBC.

The Bottom Line

Chip stocks rose at the US open on Monday after the PHLX Semiconductor index’s 11.4% weekly fall, with AMD and Micron up about 4%. By about 13:53 UTC the index had won back roughly a fifth of last week’s drop, and CoreWeave and Nebius less than a tenth, by our arithmetic.