MU, SNDK, CRWV, IREN Stocks Climb After Brutal Week: Retail Bets On Memory, Neocloud Rebound

• Micron stock gained 2.5%, while SanDisk and Western Digital shares rose about 1% each.
• The semiconductor sector entered the bear market. 
• Retail traders were ‘bullish’ on MU, SNDK, CRWV and IREN, and ‘extremely bullish’ on NBIS.

Shares of key memory firms and neocloud operators rose in overnight trading on Sunday after a brutal week for AI-linked stocks, offering some relief from the worrying downtrend that has persisted since the start of July.

Micron stock gained 2.5%, while SanDisk and Western Digital shares rose about 1% each. SanDisk shed over 29% this week, its worst weekly fall in over a year, emerging as the biggest loser in the S&P 500 index.

CoreWeave and Nebius stocks rose about 1.2% each, while IREN Ltd. gained 1%. The stocks slumped between 17% and 19% in the week, with the move said to be closely associated with the selloff in the chip sector.

Why The Chip Stock Pullback?

U.S. semiconductor stocks have fallen rapidly as investors take profits after an extended AI-driven rally and rotate into large-cap software and internet stocks. A combination of rising Treasury yields, renewed inflation worries from higher oil prices amid escalating U.S.-Iran tensions, and concerns that AI-related valuations had become stretched weighed on the sector. 

The selloff was exacerbated by growing uncertainty over whether hyperscalers would continue to invest the massive sums in AI development that they had committed at the start of the year. 

Investors are awaiting earnings from companies such as Alphabet and Intel for fresh evidence that AI demand remains strong. As a result, the iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) entered bear-market territory, declining 22% from its June 22 peak, even though analysts generally view the move as a correction and sector rotation rather than a deterioration in the long-term AI investment cycle.

Retail View On Chip, Neocloud Stocks

“SOXX semiconductor stocks are now experiencing their biggest pullback in the past year… The key question now is whether this is just a healthy correction within the semiconductor cycle or the beginning of a deeper move lower,” a trader posted on the SOXX stream on Stocktwits.  

Retail sentiment for SOXX remained ‘neutral,’ unchanged from the previous week. Traders remained upbeat on the memory segment, with a ‘bullish’ read on MU and SNDK.

“$SNDK Just bought more. It's growing 150% a year. It's down 40% for the month from the AI correction. A no-brainer to accumulate. They locked in a multi-billion dollar deal with Facebook to provide memory chips over the next few [years],” a trader wrote, projecting the stock to increase roughly three times in the next five years.

Stocktwits sentiment was ‘bullish’ for CRWV and IREN, and ‘extremely bullish’ for NBIS. A trader noted that CoreWeave is the compute supplier for China’s Moonshot AI, whose latest Kimi K3 AI model is said to be on par with leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

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