AI Compute Demand in Doubt? Micron -7%, AMD -5% as OpenAI Shelves $1T+ IPO

For the AI industry, Friday’s sharp drop in key chip stocks isn’t just a Wall Street story; it’s a warning that the financial engine driving the compute arms race may be sputtering. OpenAI’s delayed IPO—and the market’s violent reaction—underscores how dependent AI infrastructure spending is on capital markets’ willingness to fund stratospheric valuations. A prolonged funding chill could slow the rollout of massive GPU clusters that power cutting-edge models like GPT-5 and beyond.

On Friday, June 26, 2026, a sharp sell-off ripped through AI semiconductor stocks after The New York Times reported that OpenAI is delaying its highly anticipated initial public offering until at least next year. Broadcom (AVGO) dropped more than 3% in early trading before recovering to end the day with a 2.10% gain, while Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) fell over 5%, Micron Technology (MU) tumbled more than 7%, and Sandisk (SNDK) plunged nearly 10%. By the time of publication, the damage had moderated somewhat—AMD was down 2.50%, Micron 5.16%, and Sandisk 8.14%—but the intraday rout underscored just how jittery the AI chip trade has become.

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Broadcom (AVGO) dropped more than 3% in early trading before recovering to end the day with a 2.10% gain, while Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) fell over 5%, Micron Technology (MU) tumbled more than 7%, and Sandisk (SNDK) plunged nearly 10%.

The immediate catalyst was a report citing three people close to the matter, stating that OpenAI is shelving its plans for a public debut this year, hoping instead to wait for more hospitable market conditions. The blockbuster IPO of SpaceX earlier in June was supposed to open the floodgates for a wave of mega-cap tech offerings, with OpenAI and rival Anthropic expected to follow. Yet SpaceX’s own debut turned into a volatility nightmare: the stock ended its first day up 19%, surged as much as 50% from its offering price in the days that followed, but then lost most of those gains. That whipsaw spooked OpenAI’s leadership, who had set their sights on a valuation topping $1 trillion—a leap from the $730 billion assigned in its last private funding round.

For investors, the logic is straightforward: OpenAI is one of the world’s largest consumers of AI compute, and any hesitation in its capital-raising timeline dents the near-term demand outlook for the chips that power its models. Broadcom supplies custom ASICs and networking gear for hyperscale data centers; Micron provides high-bandwidth memory essential for AI workloads; AMD’s GPUs compete for those same training and inference tasks; and Sandisk’s flash storage underpins the massive data lakes that AI depends on. If a titan like OpenAI pushes out its public-market funding, other AI labs may follow suit, cooling chip orders.

This incident arrives against a backdrop of extraordinary gains. The PHLX Semiconductor Index—which tracks 30 of the largest U.S.-listed chipmakers—has climbed 429% since the AI adoption wave took hold in early 2023. But the ride has been anything but smooth: the index has suffered seven separate corrections of 10% or more in that span. The volatility of June 26 is thus not an anomaly; it is a feature of a sector where sky-high expectations meet acute sensitivity to funding signals.