Chip stocks were set for a rebound on Thursday as investors stepped back into the AI hardware trade after two brutal sessions of profit-taking.
Micron rose 3.5% in premarket trading to $982.05, while AMD and Intel also gained over 2.5% after recent Wall Street target hikes helped restore some confidence in the sector.
The bounce follows a sharp selloff across Korea, Japan and the US, where investors briefly questioned whether the AI chip rally had run too far, too fast.
Chip bulls return fast
The reversal began after one of the sharpest global chip selloffs of the year.
Samsung Electronics reported preliminary second-quarter operating profit of 89.4 trillion won on Tuesday, with sales of about 171 trillion won, confirming a record quarter driven by AI memory demand.
But instead of rallying, Korean chip stocks sold off as investors treated the results as a “sell-the-news” moment.
South Korea’s Kospi fell into technical bear-market territory on Wednesday, down 22.8% from its June 22 peak.
Samsung lost 6.3% and SK Hynix dropped 5.7% in that session, extending a two-day rout tied to fears about stretched AI valuations, higher oil prices and interest-rate risk.
The earlier selling was even more dramatic as the Kospi ended 7.9% lower last week, with SK Hynix down 14.6%, Samsung off 9.1% and Japan’s Kioxia tumbling more than 13.5% as the memory trade unwound.
By Thursday, dip-buying had returned. Kioxia rose 8.3% in Japan, while Samsung and SK Hynix also gained as investors rotated back into memory names ahead of SK Hynix’s US listing.
Wall Street is not buying the panic
The reason the rebound has traction is that analysts have not treated the pullback as a break in the AI cycle.
Bank of America’s Vivek Arya reiterated a Buy rating on Micron and kept a $1,550 price target.
Arya argued that global cloud and AI infrastructure spending could reach $1.5 trillion by 2027, with 35%-40% directed toward memory components.
His view is that investors are underestimating how memory is shifting from a deeply cyclical product into a strategic AI resource.
UBS also stayed bullish on memory. The firm raised its DRAM contract-price forecasts, with DDR prices now expected to rise 32% quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter, nearly double its earlier 17% forecast.
AMD has its own bull case as Goldman Sachs analyst James Schneider raised his AMD target to $640 from $450, citing strong AI demand and the rising role of high-performance CPUs in agentic AI workloads.
Intel’s rebound story is more about turnaround as HSBC analyst Frank Lee doubled his Intel target to $200 from $100, saying server CPU growth and the foundry business could deliver more value than investors expect.
HSBC expects design commitments in Intel Foundry to begin in the second half of 2026.
Also read- Intel, AMD stocks outperformed Nvidia in H1: what’s next?
The rally’s next checkpoint
The bullish notes do not remove the risks and Intel is the clearest example of the same phenomenon.
HSBC’s $200 target is far above broader Street expectations, and the thesis depends heavily on foundry customers turning early engagement into real design commitments.
There is also a broader valuation issue as Bank of America’s bubble-risk warning for technology and semiconductor stocks earlier this month showed that even bullish analysts are watching how crowded the trade has become.
The next tests arrive quickly. SK Hynix’s Nasdaq ADRs are due to begin trading on July 10, after Reuters reported that the $28 billion US share sale was more than seven times oversubscribed.
That debut will be a real-time measure of investor appetite for AI memory exposure.
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