Techi

SanDisk ended the first half of 2026 as the best-performing stock in the S&P 500, up 858% — from a $237.38 close on December 31 to $2,273.73 on June 30. Two sessions later, $529 of that share price was gone. Thursday's 14.1% drop — the stock's biggest one-day fall since early February — capped a 23.3% two-session slide and sent SanDisk into the July 4th weekend at $1,745, with US markets shut until Monday, July 6. What changed is the question being asked of the stock.

On June 24, one minute after the closing bell, Micron reported the largest quarter any standalone memory company has ever posted: $41.46 billion in revenue, up 346% in a year, at an 84.9% gross margin. The stock jumped 15.7% the next day to a record close of $1,213.56. Five sessions later, all of it was gone — and then some. Micron ended Thursday at $975.56, seven percent below where it traded before the report came out.

Thursday's selloff priced in an AI memory glut that, on every published construction timeline, does not exist yet. SanDisk closed down 14.1% at $1,745. Teradyne lost 13.6%, KLA 11.5%, Seagate 10.4%, Lam Research 10.2%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 5.4% on top of Wednesday's 6.3% — an 11.4% wipeout in two sessions — while the Dow rose 595 points to a record close of 52,900.07. Thursday was not a market panic. It was a targeted unwind of the single most profitable trade of 2026.

Image: TECHi hero — What makes a good crypto trading platform: judging a crypto venue on regulation, custody, fees, execution and security rather than sign-up bonuses. Most people choosing where to trade crypto get the order of operations backwards. They obsess over which coin to buy, then sign up for the first venue with a slick app and a welcome bonus.

AI has quietly entered a new realm. It has come a long way, to the point where writing is no longer one of its constraints. In seconds, it can write summaries of research, draft emails, write product descriptions, and even produce full-length articles. It has become so good that many people consume AI-generated content daily without knowing it. This is a significant change in the way information is generated on the web.

AMD set its all-time record close, $580.91, on Tuesday, June 30, 2026. It got to keep the record for exactly one session. On July 1 the stock fell 6.9% to $540.88 — about $65 billion of market value on 1.63 billion shares, a larger dollar loss than NVIDIA took the same day — and the proximate cause was a news story about a company that is not AMD. Bloomberg reported that Meta plans to sell its surplus AI computing power. For most chip stocks that was a sector headwind. For AMD it was personal.

Two things about the price of artificial intelligence became true on Wednesday, July 1, 2026, and they point in opposite directions. At midnight, a roughly 20% increase in what AWS charges for reserved NVIDIA GPU capacity took effect — announced quietly the week before. By mid-morning, Bloomberg was reporting that Meta plans to sell its surplus AI compute to outsiders.

Tesla reports second-quarter deliveries on Wednesday, July 2, 2026, and Wall Street has already written the headline: the company-compiled consensus is 406,024 vehicles. The stock walked into the print at $425.30, up 1.1% on July 1 and 24% above its April low, which tells you the market expects the number to clear. The headline is the least interesting part of the release. Tesla's delivery report is really three reports stapled together, and the other two get skimmed every quarter.

NVIDIA closed at $197.58 on Wednesday, July 1, 2026, down 1.25%. In a normal tape that is rounding error. On this tape it was the strangest print of the day — because everything around NVIDIA moved violently, in both directions, for reasons that all run through NVIDIA's chips. A Bloomberg report that Meta plans to sell its surplus AI computing power tore 10% to 17% off the companies that buy NVIDIA GPUs to rent them out.

Palantir Technologies closed at $125.73 on Wednesday, July 1, 2026 — up 7.8% in a session that added roughly $21.7 billion to its market value on 57 million shares of volume. The proximate cause was a partnership: Palantir and NVIDIA are rolling out an engine for running NVIDIA's AI models inside sovereign, secured environments, and the market treated it as a coronation.