Market Wrap · INTC, AMD
Chip Stocks Slide as Samsung Earnings Rattle the Sector — Intel and AMD Both Hit
Intel and Applied Materials both fell roughly 10% and AMD dropped about 8% on July 7, 2026, after Samsung's latest earnings report rattled sentiment across the semiconductor sector. Intel closed at $110.39, down from $122.20 the prior session — a 9.7% one-day decline. AMD closed at $516.11, down from $552.05, a 6.5% decline that Motley Fool coverage flagged as part of a run that briefly took the stock down as much as 8% intraday.
Samsung's numbers weren't really the story for either of my positions — neither Intel nor AMD reports until later this summer, AMD's fiscal Q2 results are scheduled for August 4. What moved was sentiment: Samsung's results read as a signal about near-term memory and foundry demand broadly, and the market applied that signal across the whole chip complex, including names with very different businesses and very different reasons for being in this book.
What this means for the book
This is the third distinct semiconductor drawdown I've had to write about since the July 6 AMD/Micron/Intel/SanDisk pullback, and it's hitting a different pairing this time — Intel and AMD, not the memory-and-storage cluster. Together, INTC and AMD are 12.84% of the book. Neither position's underlying thesis changed today: Intel's foundry deal flow (Apple, Google) and AMD's data-center revenue trajectory are both intact stories, unaffected by what Samsung reported. What changed is the market's near-term risk appetite for the whole group heading into a stretch with real catalysts on the calendar — AMD's Advancing AI summit on July 22–23 and its August 4 earnings date. I'm treating today as noise, not signal, and holding through both catalysts rather than reacting to a sector-wide sentiment swing that had nothing to do with either company's own numbers.