US equity futures slid sharply on July 17 as a brutal selloff in semiconductor stocks gathered momentum, with Nasdaq-100 futures dropping as much as 1.91% in premarket trading. The carnage, which started in Asian chip markets and quickly crossed the Pacific, has now erased more than $2 trillion in semiconductor market value since late June peaks.
Bitcoin didn’t escape the blast radius. The largest cryptocurrency fell 1.2% to below $63,000, while Ether dropped 1.74%. Hyperliquid’s HYPE token fared even worse, shedding more than 10% in the same sessions.
What triggered the semiconductor meltdown
The trouble started with earnings out of Asia. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix both delivered projections that fell short of what investors were expecting, despite Samsung actually setting profit records in Q2.
That disappointment lit a fuse under already-stretched valuations. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index had surged an extraordinary 88% during Q2 2026, a rally fueled almost entirely by enthusiasm around AI infrastructure spending. When Samsung’s results raised doubts about whether that spending would materialize at the scale investors had imagined, the index started unwinding fast.
