South Korea: Samsung profit surge spurs chip selloff | JQJO

United States markets faced sharp selling in technology shares on Tuesday, July 7, 2026, as Nasdaq futures fell amid a global retreat in semiconductor stocks, even after Samsung Electronics reported record preliminary earnings. Nasdaq-100 e-minis declined 270.75 points, or 0.9%, in premarket trading, reflecting broad caution among investors toward highly valued artificial intelligence-related names. The drop was led by major memory chipmakers, with Micron Technology, Western Digital and Sandisk registering steep losses, while other prominent semiconductor firms including Intel, Marvell Technology and Qualcomm also moved lower. The weakness in chip stocks contrasted with a modest advance in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which edged above the 53,000-point level, supported by gains in large enterprise software companies such as Microsoft, Salesforce and IBM.

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest memory chipmaker, reported preliminary second-quarter results that showed an estimated 19-fold jump in operating profit to 89.4 trillion won, or about $58.4 billion, surpassing its combined earnings over the previous three years. The surge in profit came from strong global demand for high-bandwidth memory chips and data center components used to power generative AI models. Instead of lifting sentiment across the sector, the blockbuster update prompted what traders described as a broad bout of profit-taking in AI-exposed semiconductor names, reinforcing concerns about the durability of recent gains and putting additional pressure on chip-related shares worldwide.