Micron Technology (MU) has been a standout name in the artificial intelligence trade for most of 2026, with its stock gaining an explosive 173.92% since the beginning of the year.
It crossed $1 trillion in market value in late May.
And then, things changed.
Over two trading days, a large piece of that run disappeared.
The stock lost 8% on Thursday, June 4, and another 13% on Friday, June 5. Together, roughly a fifth of its value was gone in two sessions.
However, the drop did not start with Micron.
Here’s what happened:
How Micron’s two-day collapse unfolded
Micron (MU) closed Friday down about 13%, its sharpest single-day fall in years, after already shedding 8% the day before.
The selling was broad. The iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) dropped 10% on Friday, its worst day since March 2020, according to Congress.net.
Marvell Technology fell more than 16%, and chip stocks shed a combined $1 trillion in market value.
Micron was not the trigger, yet it fell harder than almost any of its peers. This may have been because the stocks that climb fastest tend to give back the most when sentiment turns.
“Investors had been kind of hovering with their finger over this sell button,” said Mark Hackett, chief market strategist at Nationwide.
Why a memory stock got caught in a custom-silicon selloff
The spark came from Broadcom (AVGO), not Micron.
Broadcom’s results matched expectations, but its AI revenue guidance fell short of lofty hopes. Its shares tumbled about 12% Thursday and kept sliding.
Broadcom’s business runs on custom application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, chips built for a single customer’s AI workloads.
And although that is a different product from Micron’s memory chips, when one AI leader stumbles, traders sell the whole group first and sort out the differences later.
Related: TSMC CEO sends blunt message to memory chip rivals
A second pressure hit the same morning. The May jobs report showed 172,000 new positions, far above the 80,000 economists expected, CNBC reported.
Stronger hiring pushed the 10-year Treasury yield above 4.5% and lifted the odds of a Fed rate hike this year to 70%, according to the CME FedWatch tool.
When interest rates go up, fast-growing companies are usually hit hard, and Micron was a perfect reflection of that.
How far Micron had run before the drop
Micron’s fall looks worse because of how far it had climbed first.
The stock had more than doubled in 2026, returning about 137% year to date by early May before pushing higher to cross $1 trillion in market value on May 26.
The rally rested on real demand.
Micron makes high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, the stacked chips that sit beside AI processors and feed them data fast enough to train large models.
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Its entire 2026 HBM output is already sold out, according to 24/7 Wall St., and management says it can meet only half to two-thirds of customer demand.
That scarcity also lifted prices for standard memory, both dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), used for live computing, and NAND flash, used for storage.
But the same run left a warning sign.
Micron’s relative strength index, a momentum gauge, hit 85 in mid-May, deep into overbought territory, and readings that high rarely hold for long.
What the selloff means for Micron investors now
The two-day drop reset the price, not the business. HBM is still sold out, and Wall Street remains split on how high the stock can climb.
Here is how Micron’s slide compared with the broader market:
Micron versus the market, June 4 to June 5
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Micron: down about 20% over two sessions
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iShares Semiconductor ETF: down 10% Friday
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Nasdaq Composite: down 4.18% Friday
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S&P 500: down 2.64% Friday
The gap shows how much a high-flyer falls compared to the broad index when momentum reverses.
Analyst targets still range widely.
Mizuho reaffirmed an Outperform rating with an $800 target in late May, according to Investing.com, while Goldman Sachs has held $400, The Globe and Mail reported, a reminder that even bulls disagree on the math.
What Micron investors should watch next
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Whether DRAM and HBM contract prices hold as new factory capacity ramps toward 2028
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Whether Treasury yields keep climbing, which pressures high-multiple stocks
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Micron’s next earnings update for any change to its sold-out HBM outlook
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Signs the AI capital spending boom is slowing at major cloud buyers
The risk is easy to spot.
Memory has always been cyclical, with sharp booms followed by gluts in which supply drastically exceeds demand. And a stock priced for perfection gets hit really hard by any stumble.
However, none of that erases the demand story. It does mean the next leg of gains depends on Micron surpassing high expectations rather than just meeting them.
Related: GE Vernova CEO sends rattling message on data centers
This story was originally published by TheStreet on Jun 8, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investing section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: finance.yahoo.com
