Chip Meltdown Hits Micron, SanDisk and SK Hynix: $1 Trillion Vanishes From Memory Makers

The world’s memory chips are sold out. The companies that make them have just lost more than $1 trillion in market value. Six of the largest memory and storage makers have shed about $1.09 trillion in combined value since the close on Friday, Oct. 2. A Trillion Dollars Just Vanished From Memory Stocks South Korea took the heaviest blow. Seoul-listed shares of SK Hynix Inc. (NASDAQ:SKHY) sank 11.1% on Thursday, its seventh straight loss, and have erased about 474.5 trillion won ($352.7 billion) since Oct. 2. Shares now sit nearly 58% below their record. SK Hynix’s ADR was down 4.1% in New York trading on Thursday. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (OTC:SSNLF) fell 9.5%, a loss of 462.6 trillion won ($343.8 billion) over the same period. The Kospi index dropped 7.6% on the day. In the U.S., Micron Technology Inc. (NASDAQ:MU) fell 4.4% to $874.14 at the open, heading for a sixth straight decline. It has lost $227.1 billion in value since Oct. 2. Sandisk Corp. (NASDAQ:SNDK) dropped 6.6% to $1,311.42, bringing its loss to $59.1 billion over the period. CompanyChange since Oct. 2Value lostFrom record highSK Hynix Inc.-31.5%$352.7 billion-57.8%Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (-23.9%$343.8 billion-43.9%Micron Technology Inc. (NASDAQ:MU)-18.7%$227.1 billion-30.3%Kioxia Holdings Corp. -33.3%$76.3 billion-65.7%Sandisk Corp. (NASDAQ:SNDK)-23.8%$59.1 billion-44.3%Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ:WDC)-17.5%$27.2 billion-57.2%Source: TradingView. U.S. stocks shortly after the Oct. 15 open Three Fears at Once The first is AI spending. Anthropic’s annualized revenue reached $67.2 billion in the third quarter, Bloomberg reported. That is only modestly above the $65 billion pace it had hit at the end of July. It was the second warning sign in as many weeks. Chip stocks had already slid last week amid confusion over how fast OpenAI’s annualized revenue is really growing. The second is China. Earlier this week, Counterpoint Research reported that China’s Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., known as YMTC, has become the world’s third-largest maker of NAND flash, the memory used to store data in phones, laptops and data centers. "China will be making a LOT of RAM in 2028," Elon Musk wrote on X on Thursday. He was replying to a summary of a Maeil Business Newspaper column. The column warned that South Korea’s memory boom could face oversupply from 2029 as new capacity comes online. That leaves the country two to three years to build new growth industries. The stakes are national. South Korea’s semiconductor exports jumped 263% to $60.3 billion in September, according to government data. That is nearly half of the country’s record $120.9 billion in total exports. D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria sees the same split. "If there’s an impact, there’s some impact on SK Hynix and Samsung. It’s not on Micron," he told CNBC. The third is rates. Two hotter-than-expected inflation reports in two days revived fears of a Federal Reserve rate hike in October, and that weighed on tech stocks more broadly. On Wednesday, consumer prices rose 3.7% from a year earlier in September, above the 3.6% economists expected. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, rose to 2.6%, against 2.5% expected. On Thursday, producer prices, which track what businesses charge each other, jumped 1.3% in September. That is more than double the 0.5% forecast. Core producer prices rose 0.7%, against 0.3% expected. Higher rates make it more expensive to borrow for the data centers that buy these chips. Read Also: SK Hynix’s Worst 7-Day Loss Since 2008: AI Bubble Bursting Or Historical Opportunity? TSMC Says Demand Is Still Running Ahead The world’s largest contract chipmaker points the other way. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (NYSE:TSM) reported third-quarter revenue of $46.72 billion on Thursday, above its own guidance. It raised its 2026 growth outlook for the third time this year, to about 44%. Cantor Fitzgerald analyst C.J. Muse called it "yet another very bullish report." He said TSMC is seeing AI demand that "continues to run well ahead of supply." The stock fell anyway. TSMC’s U.S.-listed shares dropped 4.3% to $411.71 at the open. SOXX on Track for an 8-Day Losing Streak The memory selloff pushed the iShares Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SOXX) down 3.3% to $502.20 shortly after Thursday’s open. The fund is on track for its eighth straight loss, down 14.8% over that stretch. An eight-session losing streak has happened only seven times since 2001. The last time was September 2015. History offers some comfort. In six of the seven past eight-day losing streaks, SOXX was higher a year later, with an average gain of 21.1%. The exception was January 2008, when the fund fell another 42.5% over the following year. Read Also: Chip ETF SOXX Falls 7 Days in a Row: History Says It’s a Buy Signal Photo: Shutterstock