Daily Top-10 Movers

Prices are Thursday, September 17, 2026 closes at 4:00 PM EDT. Ranked by absolute price change among semiconductor stocks with market cap ≥$5B.

★ highlighted = today's news-driven movers.

SK Group Elevates Its Chip Unit as Nvidia's Huang Vows to Double Chip Volume

• SK Group has moved three vice chairmen — So Jin-woo, Yu Jeong-joon and Lee Hyung-hee — from holding company SK Inc. to SK hynix, where they are also conducting one-on-one interviews with all roughly 250 SK hynix executives, the first review of its kind in 14 years, per The Korea Herald; the moves come as Chairman Chey Tae-won pushes to establish SK hynix as the group's flagship with a targeted market capitalization around 2,000 trillion won. Why it matters: concentrating this much senior leadership inside a single subsidiary is an unusually direct signal that SK now treats memory and AI silicon as its core business, not one division among several.
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Thursday he expects the company to sell twice as many chips next year as it does this year, telling reporters ahead of an AI summit in Scotland that "people want to invest in AI" in almost every country Nvidia operates in, per CNBC; the forecast follows Nvidia's guidance for roughly 70% revenue growth to about $673 billion in the fiscal year ending January 2028. Why it matters: a volume-doubling call is a claim about unit shipments across Nvidia's full portfolio, not just its highest-margin accelerators, meaning the company is pricing in demand growth well beyond the largest cloud customers already on record.

Solidigm Weighs a U.S. NAND Plant as Server DRAM Prices Surge 5.5-Fold

• SK hynix subsidiary Solidigm is considering building a NAND flash factory in the United States, with upstate New York emerging as the leading candidate, according to three people familiar with the matter, per Reuters, via Korea JoongAng Daily; the project would be separate from SK hynix's own talks with Intel over its Ohio site, and no agreement has been reached. Why it matters: a U.S. NAND plant would cut Solidigm's reliance on its sole fab in Dalian, China, hedging against both tariffs and export-control risk even though Solidigm itself says manufacturing costs would run well above Korea.
• The fixed contract price for 64GB DDR5 server DRAM hit $1,500 as of September 15 — 5.5 times the $272 recorded a year earlier, with some spot transactions reported near $3,100 — lifting the consensus estimate for Samsung Electronics' third-quarter operating profit to 107.4 trillion won, per Seoul Economic Daily; UBS projects Samsung's HBM share will overtake SK hynix's in 2027. Why it matters: a 5.5-times price move in a single year is the clearest evidence yet that server memory, not just HBM, has become a genuine profit driver on its own — and a first-ever 100-trillion-won quarter for Samsung would confirm it.

SKC Backs Glass Substrates as SK Sells Siltron, GlobalFoundries Expands With Marvell

• SKC will channel about 590 billion won — half the proceeds of a 1.1671 trillion won rights offering — into its glass-substrate business over the next three years, timed alongside SK Inc.'s previously announced sale of its 70.6% stake in wafer maker SK Siltron to Doosan Corporation for roughly 2.3 trillion won, per Seoul Economic Daily. Why it matters: glass substrates offer lower thermal expansion and better flatness than today's organic packaging materials, and SK funding that shift with proceeds from exiting a commodity wafer business shows where it sees the next packaging margin pool forming.
• GlobalFoundries and Marvell Technology expanded a multi-year agreement to add silicon-germanium capacity at GlobalFoundries' Burlington, Vermont facility, supporting next-generation pluggable optical transceivers and co-packaged optics for AI data centers, per GlobeNewswire. Why it matters: as AI clusters scale, moving data between accelerators is becoming as much of a bottleneck as compute itself, and a U.S.-based capacity expansion for optical interconnect silicon is a direct bet that bottleneck gets worse before it gets better.

House Passes Ratepayer Act 417-3 as Huawei Moves Up Its Ascend 960 Launch

• The U.S. House voted 417-3 to pass the Ratepayer Protection Act, which directs states to consider a federal standard requiring data centers to pay the full cost of the electricity-grid upgrades built to serve them, per Tech Times; the bill codifies parts of the White House's March 4 Ratepayer Protection Pledge, under which Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI committed to covering their own grid costs. Why it matters: a 417-3 vote is about as close to consensus as Congress gets, signaling that shielding household electricity bills from data-center buildout costs is no longer a partisan fight — even as the bill leaves states free to opt out.
• Huawei moved up the launch of its Ascend 960DT AI chip to the first quarter of 2027, three quarters earlier than previously planned, with a companion Ascend 960PR chip following in the third quarter, each promising double the performance of the current Ascend 950 generation, per TechCrunch. Why it matters: Huawei is explicitly framing the accelerated timeline as a challenge to Nvidia inside China, and pulling a chip generation forward by three quarters is a sign Beijing's domestic-silicon push has more urgency behind it than roadmap slides alone would suggest.

SemiAnalysis Maps Nvidia's Backstop as Motley Fool Flags a 2027 DRAM Crunch

• SemiAnalysis's "Nvidia's Backstop Universe" report projects Nvidia could accumulate roughly $1.4 trillion in cash and investments by fiscal 2031, built on its AI Cloud Partner program that backstops GPU rental contracts at an average of about $2.35 per hour per GPU for six years — well below the $4.50–$4.60 range on comparable five-year market contracts, per SemiAnalysis (background reading, published September 11).
• The Motley Fool reports that SK hynix is now forecasting 2027 will bring the worst DRAM supply-demand imbalance in the industry's history, with the market not expected to balance until 2030 at the earliest, while TrendForce data show conventional DRAM contract prices up 93–98% quarter-over-quarter in early 2026 with 58–63% further gains forecast the following quarter, per The Motley Fool.

SEMICON India Wraps Up and Micron's Earnings Clock Starts Ticking

• Saturday, September 19 — SEMICON India 2026 concludes its three-day run at Yashobhoomi in New Delhi, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened the event Wednesday with more than 600 participating companies and roughly 50,000 visitors from 52 countries, per SEMI.
• Tuesday, September 30 — Micron Technology reports fiscal fourth-quarter earnings, with TD Cowen's Krish Sankar watching for a share-buyback authorization in the low-$20 billion range alongside the memory-pricing commentary the market has been trading on all week, per Yahoo Finance.