AI Bubble Fears Return as Memory Chips Sell Off and IPOs Loom

The AI bubble debate returned to the front page on Tuesday, June 23, 2026, with Micron, Sandisk, Seagate and Western Digital leading a fresh selloff that dragged the tech-heavy Nasdaq lower. South Korea’s KOSPI fell sharply overnight, with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix absorbing the heaviest losses.

The same questions that surfaced in November 2025 are resurfacing with new urgency, because the next two companies queued to test whether public markets will pay for the AI build-out are OpenAI and Anthropic. Anthropic filed confidential IPO paperwork with the SEC on June 1. SpaceX, which went public at $135 a share on June 12, briefly fell below its opening price on Tuesday, per the Tuesday report on the chip rout and Nasdaq slide.

The Same Rout, Seven Months Apart

The November 25, 2025 selloff and the June 23, 2026 selloff read like the same story with a few characters swapped. Both sessions saw memory and storage chip stocks lead the decline, and both sessions spilled out of Asia to drag the tech-heavy Nasdaq lower.

In November, the trigger was nervousness ahead of Micron’s Wednesday results. Micron’s shares took the worst beating, with the rest of the memory complex (Samsung, SK Hynix) and the logic chip complex (Intel, AMD) all trading lower. Seven months later, the trigger is a sharp overnight drop in South Korea’s KOSPI, and the same memory and storage names are the ones falling fastest, per the November 25 broadcast laying out the AI bubble debate.

What the two days share is the same pattern: memory and storage chip stocks lead the decline, with the same KOSPI-to-Nasdaq transmission. The market is now waiting for the next signal from Micron and the memory complex.

Memory Chips Carry the Brunt

Memory and storage stocks have been the levered bet on the AI build-out, which is why they swung furthest in both directions. High-bandwidth memory, the chip type used to feed data to AI accelerators, has run hot for over a year. As of last November, Micron’s stock had skyrocketed close to 800% in the previous twelve months on the strength of that demand.

By last Friday, the Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF had fallen 11% from its May high into correction territory, with chip and storage names the heaviest weights, per the Roundhill MAGS ETF correction since the May high.

The same dynamic that lifted those stocks is what makes them fragile in a selloff. When the AI trade wobbles, the names with the most cyclical exposure to AI infrastructure budgets get hit first. The June 23 session was a textbook case.

Sandisk dropped 12%, Seagate and Western Digital were each off roughly 8%, and Micron dove more than 10% in early trading. Memory and storage move as a block because the AI memory boom has built the trade.

What the Spending Stack Looks Like

The doubts are landing because the spending keeps compounding. According to Stanford University’s AI Index Report, global corporate AI investment has run at unprecedented levels for half a decade, with the most recent year alone clearing the half-trillion mark. The capital committed to AI infrastructure is now multiple times the annual investment, and the visible market capitalisation being asked of the AI trade has raced past it.

Anthropic vaulted past OpenAI in late May after a Series H funding round that drew in record capital, taking the lead in the race to be the most valuable AI startup. Both companies are now operating at private valuations that no AI company has ever reached, and neither has yet reported a profitable quarter. The public market is about to get its first real read on the AI thesis when SpaceX’s share price becomes a daily tape, per June 1 record close where Nvidia carried the tape. OpenAI’s IPO filing is expected to follow Anthropic’s, and the market will have two more chances to put a price on the AI trade.

• $580 billion: corporate AI investment in the year leading into late 2025 (Stanford AI Index Report)
• Over $1 trillion: AI investment in the four years before that
• $965 billion: Anthropic’s late May 2026 post-money valuation
• $852 billion: OpenAI’s March 2026 valuation
• $47 billion: Anthropic’s annualized run-rate revenue as of mid-May 2026
• $135: SpaceX’s IPO price per share, set on June 3, 2026

The IPO Test Investors Cannot Dodge

The IPO pipeline is now the most concrete way the AI trade gets priced in public. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are the three companies in the queue, and the public market will get to vote on the trillion-dollar AI build-out one IPO at a time. The first of those votes is already being cast on the SpaceX tape, per the early-June report on SpaceX’s $135 IPO target.

SpaceX already trades publicly, with its share price becoming a daily tape that investors track alongside the AI trade. Anthropic has filed for a public listing, with the SEC paperwork opening the door to a listing before year-end, per Anthropic’s $65 billion Series H funding announcement. OpenAI is publicly weighing a similar move but has not yet filed.

The combined capital being asked of public investors by just these three companies, with SpaceX already trading, is in the range of $4 trillion, with the broader Asia chip complex already bracing for the AI IPO cash wave. The SpaceX trade has been a live test of how the AI thesis holds up in a public tape, per the June 23 column on the coming AI IPO pipeline. The company is known for rockets, but it has become an AI play as investors bet on a future of orbital data centers.

• SpaceX: Priced at $135 per share, $1.77 trillion valuation; opened trading June 12, closed the first day at $160.95, fell to $154.60 by Monday, briefly below $150 on Tuesday June 23
• Anthropic: Filed confidentially for an IPO on June 1, 2026, after raising $65 billion in Series H funding at a $965 billion valuation
• OpenAI: Last reported in March at an $852 billion valuation after a $122 billion funding round; has not yet filed IPO paperwork

The Math Behind the Doubt

The spending is real, and so is the gap between the spending and the revenue it has produced so far. Audited figures published last week by financial blogger Ed Zitron and the Financial Times, cited in a June 23 Los Angeles Times column, indicate that OpenAI lost $38.5 billion in 2025 on revenue of $13.1 billion. The Los Angeles Times reporter asked OpenAI whether the figures were accurate; the company did not reply.

The math problem is showing up in customer bills. Per Axios, one company received a $500 million bill from Anthropic for Claude tokens in a single month after failing to set usage limits. Uber’s chief technology officer said in April that the company had spent its entire 2026 budget for Anthropic’s Claude platform by mid-March, and Uber’s chief operating officer said in a May podcast that the ride-hailing giant had not seen productivity gains commensurate with its AI spending. The ‘Are we going to start to see returns?’ question, which SmartTech Research CEO Mark Vena put to the market in November 2025, is the same one investors are asking now.

The market is trying to kind of digest all this and saying, ‘Are we going to start to see returns?’

Mark Vena, CEO of SmartTech Research, asked it in a November 2025 broadcast that framed the bull and bear cases side by side. The question has not been answered since. The market is still digesting the same trillion-dollar build.

Where the Two Camps Stand

The November 2025 broadcast put the central tension plainly for anyone watching the AI trade. D.A. Davidson head of technology research Gil Luria called the market bipolar, oscillating between the view that AI is going to boost productivity and lift every company exposed to it, and the view that AI is a big waste of time and not worth the return on investment. Seven months later, the same oscillation is visible in the tape.

The market just continues to oscillate between ‘AI is going to be great and increase productivity and all these companies are going to win’ and ‘AI is a big waste of time and it’s not worth the return on investment at all and this is all one big bubble.’

Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, made the observation in a November 2025 broadcast on the AI trade. The bipolar framing has held up through every rally and selloff since. It may be tested again when Anthropic’s IPO pricing window opens.

The difference in June 2026 is that the AI trade is no longer just a private valuation game. Public investors are about to vote on the trillion-dollar build-out with their own dollars, and the SpaceX chart is the first ballot.

The bullish case has not gone away. Anthropic’s annualized run-rate revenue rose from $14 billion in February to $47 billion in May, and OpenAI’s revenue crossed $20 billion in 2025, up from $6 billion in 2024. The companies losing the most money are also growing the fastest, and the AI infrastructure build-out is still in its early stages, with multiple trillion-dollar data center projects still to break ground.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Stock prices and valuations change rapidly. The figures cited are accurate as of publication on June 24, 2026. Readers should consult a licensed financial professional before making investment decisions.