NASDAQ Slides 3% as Chip Stocks Falter, IBM Gains Momentum

CNBC’s Dominic Chu opened Tuesday’s market coverage by noting a pattern uncommon in 2026. A tech sell‑off that began Monday accelerated after memory‑chip shares fell on Asian markets overnight, he said, with U.S. premarket losses hitting the expected sectors. The NASDAQ‑100 proxy (QQQ) slipped 2.57% in intraday trading, a significant drop at current levels.

The memory trade snaps after a historic run

Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) was the primary catalyst. “Micron picked up where Asian stocks left off, falling more than 10% in early trading,” Chu reported. Micron’s stock dropped 10.53% intraday, moving from $1,211.38 to $1,083.84. Despite a 230% year‑to‑date gain and a 716% increase over the past year, the stock faced a sharp correction. The company recently posted a 39.74% EPS beat on $23.86 billion in revenue and guided the next quarter to $33.5 billion in revenue with an approximate 81% gross margin, as disclosed in its Q2 FY26 earnings release. Retail interest also spiked on r/wallstreetbets, where a post titled “I just suck at this game” earned 145 upvotes during the Monday sell‑off.

Storage and chips drag in sympathy

Seagate Technology (NASDAQ:STX) fell 6.31% to $1,025.01, retreating from $1,094.04 and erasing part of its 241% year‑to‑date rally driven by HAMR adoption. Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) also declined despite a recent Q1 earnings beat, with data‑center and AI revenue up 22% to $5.05 billion and its new Xeon 6 CPU selected as the host for NVIDIA’s DGX Rubin NVL8. In addition, Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) slid 4.77% to $525.32, pulling back from a 157.58% year‑to‑date surge, following commentary from CEO Lisa Su that Meta will deploy up to 6 gigawatts of Instinct GPUs beginning with the MI450.

Oracle’s headcount surprise

Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) disclosed a reduction of roughly 21,000 employees—about 13% of its global workforce—in a regulatory filing, prompting a 4% dip in its share price. The cut coincides with a $638 billion backlog of performance obligations, up 363% YoY, and capital expenditures of $55.7 billion over the trailing four quarters. Free cash flow now stands at negative $23.7 billion, raising concerns about the cost of funding its expansive cloud initiatives.

IBM bucks everything

The contrarian winner was International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM). “One bright spot in the larger tech sell‑off is IBM. It’s up almost 5% after an upgrade to overweight by JPMorgan Chase,” Chu said. The stock rose 5.44% to $265.93 after the upgrade. IBM’s generative‑AI revenue has more than doubled, reaching over $12.5 billion by Q4 2025 from $6 billion in Q1 2025, and the company recorded a fourth consecutive EPS beat in Q1 2026 at $1.91 versus $1.81 expected. Mainframe growth drove a 51% increase in IBM Z revenue in Q1, while the Infrastructure segment’s profit margin expanded to 15.8% from 8.6%. With a beta of 0.665 and a forward P/E of about 20x, IBM appears poised to withstand market volatility. CEO Arvind Krishna highlighted AI as a sustained tailwind during the earnings call, noting that investors are rewarding reliable AI revenue over speculative growth.

The episode reflected a sector rotation: memory chips had risen sharply and were correcting, Oracle’s restructuring underscored the expense of aggressive cloud expansion, while IBM’s steady AI‑driven growth offered a defensive posture in a down market.

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