US stock futures split along tech lines early Tuesday after Samsung’s record profit forecast failed to impress investors.

Shortly after 7 a.m. ET, Nasdaq 100 futures were down about 0.7% near 29,730, with S&P 500 futures off 0.2%. Dow Jones futures bucked the trend, edging up 0.1% — one day after the blue-chip index logged its first close above 53,000. The VIX hovered near 15.6, and gold eased 0.5% to around $4,148 an ounce.

Samsung’s Blowout Guidance — and Why It Backfired

The overnight story came out of Seoul. Samsung Electronics guided for second-quarter operating profit of approximately 89.4 trillion Korean won — roughly $58.4 billion — on sales of about 171 trillion won, according to the company’s official earnings guidance released Tuesday. That is a roughly 19-fold jump from the 4.68 trillion won reported a year earlier, driven by AI-fueled demand that has pushed memory chip prices to record highs. The figure also beat the LSEG SmartEstimate of 87.3 trillion won.

The market’s response: sell the news. Samsung shares sank as much as 10% during the Seoul session before closing down 6.9%, and fellow memory maker SK Hynix fell sharply alongside it. The Kospi closed the day deep in the red, giving back a chunk of the AI-driven gains that had powered the index to records this year.

Why would a record quarter trigger a rout? Investors are asking whether memory pricing is at or near its cyclical peak — and after the volatility of late June, positioning in the AI trade remains crowded. When a blowout number is already priced in, the number alone is no longer enough.

US Chip Stocks Feel the Heat Premarket

The Seoul sell-off crossed the Pacific before sunrise. In premarket trading, Micron Technology fell 5.6%, Western Digital lost 6.2% and Sandisk dropped 5.2%, with Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD, KLA and Marvell Technology all trading lower. Memory names are the most directly exposed: Micron’s own rally had recently pushed its market value past Meta’s, a sign of how much AI-driven repricing the sector has already absorbed.

Not everyone reads the pullback as a warning. Morgan Stanley argued in a note dated Monday that recent weakness in US semiconductor stocks is a sign that market gains are broadening, with investors likely to rotate toward AI hyperscalers — consistent with how Wall Street has been rebuilding its ideal AI portfolio beyond the handful of names that dominated 2025.

The Dow’s Record Stands Apart

Monday’s session showed the other side of that rotation. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 156.73 points, or 0.30%, to 53,056.80 — its first-ever close above the 53,000 mark and its fifth 1,000-point milestone of 2026. The S&P 500 added 0.72% to 7,537.48, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 1.12% to 26,121.16.

That divergence — Dow futures steady while Nasdaq futures slide — suggests Tuesday’s chip weakness is, for now, a sector story rather than a market-wide one.

What to Watch for the Open

  • FOMC minutes, Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET. The minutes from the Federal Reserve’s June 16–17 meeting — Chair Kevin Warsh’s first — will be scrutinized for the internal debate behind the hawkish pivot. Warsh said on July 1 that US inflation remains «too high», but the June jobs report missed badly, with nonfarm payrolls up just 57,000 — roughly half of consensus — complicating the case for tighter policy.
  • Memory-chip follow-through. Watch whether Micron and Western Digital hold premarket losses into the cash session, or whether dip buyers step in as they did in late June. Samsung’s full quarterly results, with divisional detail, arrive July 30.
  • Earnings. Penguin Solutions reports Tuesday — a small-cap read on enterprise AI memory demand ahead of the big names later this month.
  • The record backdrop. With the Dow above 53,000 and the VIX below 16, the bar for a genuine risk-off move remains high. A chip-led Nasdaq dip with the Dow flat would confirm rotation; both indexes falling together would signal something broader.

The AI trade isn’t ending — but Tuesday is a test of whether it can survive its own good news.