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Live Nasdaq Composite: Tech Rises on Chip Stock Tailwinds but Software Sinks

By Gerelyn Terzo · Updated Jul 9, 12:32pm ET · Published Jul 9, 9:53am ET

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Zuck Tweets, Meta Rises

Meta (NASDAQ:META) stock flipped from red to green after Mark Zuckerberg took to X to announce the release of Muse Spark 1.1, a new agentic and coding model available at a low price point through Meta’s new Model API and within Meta AI. The post, Zuckerberg’s first on the platform since 2023, carried enough weight to reverse the stock’s intraday direction on its own.

PepsiCo Plummets

PepsiCo (Nasdaq: PEP) stock fell 4% after earnings came in a penny light, even as revenue cleared expectations. The softer read came from the U.S. consumer, with management pointing to tighter household budgets, inflation pressure, and weaker North American beverage demand.

 

Memory Bottleneck

Memory is becoming one of the clearest pressure points in the AI buildout. Global memory sales climbed 31.7% from the prior month to a record $74.6 billion, reflecting the strain that AI demand is putting on supply chains. NAND sales rose 40.7% to $25.8 billion, while DRAM reached $48 billion, reinforcing how much of the AI trade now depends on the chips that feed and store data.

UBS expects the squeeze to persist, with sharp price increases and supply shortages potentially lasting into mid-2028. That backdrop could favor Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix, and SanDisk. Bernstein is still bullish in the near term, but sees a slower pace of price gains ahead as weaker consumer demand starts to take some heat out of the market.

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The Nasdaq Composite pushed higher Thursday morning as chip stocks moved back into market leadership, giving tech investors a reason to look past another flare-up in U.S.-Iran tensions. The Nasdaq rose 0.6%, outpacing a 0.3% gain in the S&P 500, while the Dow hovered near the flatline. Semiconductors were the clearest pocket of strength. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF climbed about 4%, buoyed by a 7.9% jump in Micron (Nasdaq: MU) and a 6% gain in SanDisk (Nasdaq; SNDK), as investors returned to the AI memory trade after a rough stretch for chip names.

The rebound came against a more complicated macro backdrop. Renewed fighting around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz kept oil risk in focus, even as crude prices backed away from the worst-case scenario. Software stocks, meanwhile, were weaker after KeyBanc downgraded Salesforce (Nasdaq: CRM) adding pressure to the SaaS side of the tech trade just as semiconductors regained momentum.

Here’s a look at where things stand as of pre-morning trading:

Dow Jones Industrial Average: 52,400 Up 0.10%
Nasdaq Composite: 29,705 Up 1.5%
S&P 500: 7,515 Up 0.44%

Market Movers

SK Hynix is reportedly guiding its U.S. ADR offering at $149 per share, a 3.1% premium to its Korea close. The pricing keeps investor appetite for AI-linked memory names front and center.

Micron (Nasdaq: MU) is raising the stakes in U.S. chipmaking, saying it now expects to invest $250 billion domestically through 2035. The company also announced up to $3 billion in new spending aimed at strengthening the U.S. semiconductor supply chain and expanding the manufacturing base needed for next-generation technology.

Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) is reportedly moving deeper into custom silicon, with its Iris AI chip expected to enter production in September, according to Reuters. The chip is part of Meta’s in-house training and inference accelerator roadmap, a sign the company wants more control over the hardware powering its AI ambitions. Meta is also planning a roughly $10 billion data center in Sturgeon County, Alberta, marking its first such facility in Canada. The 1-gigawatt project, expected to rely largely on natural gas, would require about 3,000 construction workers and create roughly 300 full-time jobs.

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Gerelyn Terzo

Gerelyn Terzo is the author of dividend investing handbook "Dividend Investing Strategies: How to Have Your Cake & Eat It Too." A veteran financial journalist, she covers agri-finance for outlets like Global AgInvesting and the broader stock market and personal finance for 24/7 Wall Street. She began at CNBC and later helped launch Fox Business in New York. Gerelyn currently resides in Woodland Park, Colorado and dabbles in nature photography as a hobby.

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