Daily Top-10 Movers

Prices are Friday, September 25, 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.

Qualcomm Locks In Apple Royalties to 2027 as ON Semiconductor's AI Power Story Gains Notice

• Qualcomm and Apple renewed their global patent license agreement on September 24, effective April 1, 2027, extending a relationship rooted in the companies' 2019 settlement and covering wireless-communication patents independent of chip supply, per TradingKey; financial terms were not disclosed. Qualcomm shares closed Friday up 3.97% at $201.97, per StockAnalysis. Why it matters: the renewal decouples Qualcomm's highest-margin licensing revenue from its shrinking share of Apple's modem business, insulating that income stream from a transition — Apple's move to in-house C-series modems — that had otherwise been read as a structural headwind.
• ON Semiconductor trades at roughly 17 times forward earnings versus 28 times for Texas Instruments and 23 times for Analog Devices, even as its silicon-carbide content per AI server rack is projected to jump from $15,000 to $115,000 with the shift to 800-volt DC power, per 24/7 Wall St; the company posted second-quarter non-GAAP EPS of $0.74 versus a $0.7153 estimate, with free cash flow up 300.94% to $425.4 million. Why it matters: ON's valuation still prices it like a cyclical automotive-analog supplier despite new design wins in Nvidia's MGX ecosystem and AWS power systems — a gap that closes only if the market starts treating power semiconductors as AI infrastructure rather than an industrial afterthought.

SK Hynix's Solidigm Weighs a $150 Billion IPO as Samsung's HBM Share Is Set to Approach 40%

• SK Hynix's Solidigm — the Rancho Cordova, California-based NAND unit built from its roughly $9 billion 2021 acquisition of Intel's memory business — met with investment banks this week on a possible U.S. IPO that could value it at up to $150 billion and raise as much as $15 billion as early as 2027, Reuters reported Friday, per Benzinga; SK Hynix told Reuters that Solidigm "is reviewing various options to strengthen its business competitiveness" but confirmed no formal plans. Why it matters: a $150 billion valuation would be the largest semiconductor IPO on record, well above Arm's $54 billion 2023 listing and Cerebras's $56 billion debut this year, letting SK Hynix crystallize AI-driven enterprise-SSD demand years ahead of a conventional exit timeline.
• KB Securities expects Samsung Electronics' fourth-quarter HBM market share to reach approximately 40%, up from 33% in the second quarter, as HBM4 mass production ramps and 4-nanometer foundry yields hold above 80%, per Seoul Economic Daily; the brokerage kept a buy rating with a 600,000 won target, more than double Monday's 273,000 won share price. Why it matters: the HBM share gain and foundry stabilization are the fundamental case brokerages are using to buy Monday's macro-driven dip — a bet that memory and foundry execution, not bond yields, sets Samsung's direction into year-end.

TSMC Affiliate Vanguard Weighs a Second Singapore Fab as Tokyo Electron Rides an AI Rally

• Vanguard International Semiconductor, the TSMC affiliate that inaugurated its first Singapore plant Monday, is already considering a second facility after the $7.8 billion first plant sold out capacity before reaching full production, Chairman Leuh Fang said, per Bloomberg; the joint venture, VisionPower Semiconductor Manufacturing, pairs Vanguard with NXP Semiconductors. "The supply shortage will last for a while. We should've built two plants together here," Fang said, adding that technology choices for a second plant would drive its total investment size. Why it matters: a legacy-node foundry affiliate selling out capacity before its first plant is fully ramped is a supply-tightness signal that extends well beyond leading-edge AI logic, into the mature and specialty nodes NXP and other analog and auto-chip makers depend on.
• Tokyo Electron shares closed Friday's Tokyo session up 4.82% at 56,520 yen, the largest single contributor to the Nikkei 225's 1.30% gain, as semiconductor and AI-related shares led the index broadly higher, per Ad-Hoc News. Why it matters: the equipment maker's outsized single-stock contribution to a broad index move shows how concentrated Japan's AI-capex trade has become in a handful of wafer-fab-equipment suppliers, leaving the Nikkei unusually dependent on sentiment toward a small group of names.

Trump's Iran Rejection Sends Treasury Yields to a 2004 High as Korea Selling Intensifies

• President Trump rejected Iran's latest de-escalation proposal early Monday, sending the 30-year Treasury yield toward its highest level since 2004 and pushing Brent crude to $106 a barrel, up 17% this month, with markets now pricing a second consecutive October Federal Reserve rate hike, per Vantage Markets. Why it matters: a higher-for-longer rate path raises the discount rate applied to the multi-year AI capex and earnings growth priced into semiconductor equities broadly, not only the Korean memory names that led Monday's decline.
• South Korea saw 2.3027 trillion won in net foreign selling Monday as the KOSPI dropped 2.22% to 6,923.57, breaking below 7,000 for the first time since September 21, with one unnamed securities-industry official citing "the view that artificial intelligence investment has peaked and the continuing Middle East conflict" as drivers of the unwind, per Seoul Economic Daily. Why it matters: an "AI-investment-has-peaked" framing, even from a single anonymous source, signals that some of Monday's selling is a bet against the sustainability of AI capex itself — a more bearish read than a pure rates story, with direct implications for every capex-dependent equipment and foundry name in this edition.

SemiAnalysis Maps China's AI Datacenter Boom as Chip Stock Investor Bets on Intel's CPUs

• SemiAnalysis's new China Datacenter Model tracked more than 1,000 facilities across 60-plus operators and found China now operates over 24 gigawatts of datacenter capacity — more than EMEA and the rest of Asia combined — with ByteDance alone occupying roughly a fifth of delivered capacity and combined Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu capital spending reaching $20 billion last quarter, double a year earlier, per SemiAnalysis (published September 25).
• Chip Stock Investor argued Intel's stock recovery — up more than 200% year-to-date — is increasingly a bet on CPU-side demand to orchestrate AI agents at scale, citing 59% year-over-year growth in Intel's Data Center and AI segment to $6.3 billion last quarter and a 48% jump in server average selling prices, while cautioning the shares have "priced in considerable growth assumptions" against just 5% free-cash-flow margins, per Chip Stock Investor (published September 28).

Micron's Earnings and OpenAI's DevDay Anchor a Pivotal Week Ahead

• Tuesday, September 29 — OpenAI holds its annual DevDay in San Francisco, the company's largest developer event of the year, per OpenAI.
• Wednesday, September 30 — Micron Technology reports fiscal fourth-quarter results, with the HBM4 ramp, DRAM/NAND pricing follow-through, and gross-margin guidance in focus, per Micron Technology.