Markets MU AUG 18, 2026

SOXX craters 5.4% as $3T shadow-debt exposé, Anthropic's $65B miss trigger rotation into software

Micron −7.3%, Marvell −9%, Teradyne −10% as the AI hardware trade unwinds; Adobe +4.6% on CLSA initiation and a BlackRock 10% stake.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

The iShares Semiconductor ETF fell roughly 5.4% intraday Tuesday, with Micron down 7.3%, Marvell down 9%, Teradyne and Ciena each down 10%, and SanDisk off 9.1% alongside Western Digital’s 5.3% drop. The tape wasn’t reacting to a single earnings shock. It was reacting to two documents published the day before that, read together, reprice the AI capex cycle.

The first was a Wall Street Journal investigation by Peter Rudegeair and Peter Santilli identifying roughly $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet AI commitments across nine top tech firms. Around $1.2 trillion sits in uncommenced data-center leases (up fourfold year over year), with another $1.9 trillion in purchase commitments for chips, construction, and energy. Traditional capex across the group totaled about $600 billion. The story anchors on Meta’s Hyperion Louisiana campus and its financing through Blue Owl Capital, the kind of structure Morgan Stanley has been quietly warehousing across the sector.

The second was Anthropic’s Bloomberg-reported $65 billion July run rate, up from $47 billion in May and $9 billion at year-end 2025, with Reuters adding a projected $190–$200 billion in 2028 revenue. Venture-side whispers, per Bloomberg and TechCrunch, put current ARR above $80 billion and 2027 exit ARR at $400–$500 billion.

That should be bullish for chips. It wasn’t. The combination told the market that hyperscaler AI spend is being funded off-book at exactly the moment the 30-year Treasury yield hit a 19-year high on the session and the 10-year sat near 4.7%, in the 96th percentile of its trailing 12-month range. Prediction markets assigned a 97.5% probability that Micron closes lower.

The rotation went straight into the iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF. Adobe rallied 4.6% on a CLSA initiation and a disclosed BlackRock 10% stake. Salesforce (Agentforce, Data360), Netflix, monday.com, HubSpot, and Intuit caught bids as software absorbed the flow.

The structural read, per 24/7 Wall St.: the AI trade is bifurcating. Hardware carries the balance-sheet risk of the buildout; software collects the rent. When rates make the shadow financing legible, the market prices the split accordingly.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.