What Happened?
A number of stocks fell in the afternoon session after the AVGO earnings overhang and the stronger-than-expected jobs report combined to drive one of the broadest global chip selloff of the year.
The damage spread globally: South Korea's Kospi fell 5.5%, with Samsung down 6.4% and SK Hynix nearly 10%. European names followed: ASML fell 3.8% and Infineon lost more than 6%. The mechanism is two-fold. Broadcom's guidance miss reset expectations for the pace of hyperscaler AI chip spending, removing the sector's most visible growth catalyst.
The 172,000-payroll print then eliminated near-term rate cut hopes and introduced rate hike risk by year end per CME FedWatch. Semiconductor valuations, built on aggressive multi-year earnings assumptions, are acutely sensitive to these discount rate movements.
The stock market overreacts to news, and big price drops can present good opportunities to buy high-quality stocks.
Among others, the following stocks were impacted:
- Semiconductor Manufacturing company Photronics (NASDAQ: PLAB) fell 6%. Is now the time to buy Photronics? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
- Processors and Graphics Chips company Qorvo (NASDAQ: QRVO) fell 5.2%. Is now the time to buy Qorvo? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
- Analog Semiconductors company Texas Instruments (NASDAQ: TXN) fell 5.7%. Is now the time to buy Texas Instruments? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
Zooming In On Photronics (PLAB)
Photronics’s shares are extremely volatile and have had 40 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 3 days ago when the stock gained 3.9% on the news that Jensen Huang's (Nvidia's CEO) GTC Taipei keynote at Computex reframed how large and how long the AI chip cycle will run.
The first announcement — Vera Rubin entering full production — confirmed the next wave of data center AI compute is now locked in. Vera Rubin, Nvidia's successor to Blackwell, delivers a 10x reduction in inference token cost and requires 4x fewer GPUs to train the same models. Thousands of Nvidia engineers were involved in its development, and system builders already in full-scale production include Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro, and IBM. That list is a read-through for the entire AI supply chain: every name on it needs more servers, more memory, more optical connectivity, and more chip equipment.
The second announcement carried a different charge. Nvidia unveiled RTX Spark — an Arm-based AI PC chip co-developed with MediaTek — and Jensen Huang said Nvidia and Microsoft are going to "reinvent the PC." RTX Spark integrates a Blackwell GPU and a Grace CPU on a single package with 128GB of unified memory, capable of running 120-billion-parameter AI models locally without cloud connectivity. It launches later in the year on Windows PCs from Microsoft, Dell, HP, ASUS, Lenovo, and MSI.
Photronics is down 11.7% since the beginning of the year, and at $29.49 per share, it is trading 46.4% below its 52-week high of $54.96 from May 2026. Despite the year-to-date decline, investors who bought $1,000 worth of Photronics’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $2,241.
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