China Spooked Memory Stocks. Investors Picked Their Losers. Jeremy Berke Tue, October 13, 2026 at 4:33 PM EDT 2 min read NVDA 688825.SS SKHY 005930.KS MU Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
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China rattled the memory trade on Tuesday. But by the close, investors had made up their minds about who actually has a problem. It's the DRAM makers.
ChangXin Memory Technologies, China's biggest memory chipmaker, said over the weekend it had made real progress on a new chip design that crams more data into less space, CNBC reports. Asia took it badly: SK Hynix plunged more than 10% in Seoul and Samsung fell over 7%.
U.S. memory stocks opened in the same hole, with nearly every name down 5% to 8%. Then the buyers showed up.
Seagate, Western Digital and SanDisk clawed back almost all of it and closed down less than 2%. Micron didn't get the same rescue. It finished down 3.6%, its second straight loss. SK Hynix's U.S. shares fell 3.2%. The S&P 500 ended flat.
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The split makes sense. CXMT makes DRAM, the same chips Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung sell. A Chinese rival closing the gap is a direct shot at their pricing. Hard drives and flash storage are a different business.
Some analysts think the market overreacted. Rayliant's Phillip Wool told CNBC that CXMT still hasn't shown it can produce at scale, and it isn't a threat yet in the high-bandwidth memory chips that power AI. He said the selloff showed "how vulnerable AI sentiment is at this moment."
Still, the CXMT news looks more like an excuse than a cause. Memory stocks were already well off their highs before the weekend, with Micron down about a quarter from its peak and Western Digital down by half. Investors have been hunting for a reason to take profits on the AI trade's biggest winners. China handed them one, and they used it on the stocks with the most to lose.
