Power was the safe harbor as a Samsung-led chip selloff dragged the fabrication and interconnect layers lower into Broadcom's print.

Power was the safe harbor. Constellation Energy (CEG) rose 2.0% to $280.31, the basket's leader, as capital rotated toward the electricity chokepoint on a day when an oil-driven inflation scare sent the broad market lower and energy was the only strongly bid S&P sector. CEG owns the scarcest input in the AI buildout after HBM — dispatchable, carbon-free baseload for datacenters — and its nuclear fleet is the cleanest public proxy for that strait. The power-and-thermal cohort held with it: Modine (MOD) +1.4% to $180.91, Vistra (VST) +0.5%, against an otherwise soft tape.

The interconnect layer broke hardest. Credo Technology (CRDO) fell 8.6% to $206.63 — the basket's worst — a steep repricing into its fiscal Q1 results, which landed after the close. Credo's active electrical cables and SerDes sit on the die-to-die and rack-scale connectivity chokepoint, the plumbing between accelerators, so it trades as a high-beta read on AI-networking sentiment; on a session that hammered every speculative chip name, it led the fall going into the print. Optical transport followed: Lumentum (LITE) −5.0% to $868.95 and Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) −4.0%.

The selling was a semis-led risk-off, touched off overnight by Samsung results that sparked a global chip decline. Fabrication and materials — the deepest chokepoint in the stack — bore it: SUMCO's ADR (SUOPY) −5.7%, SK hynix (000660.KS) −4.7% in Seoul trading, Camtek (CAMT) −4.4%, Entegris (ENTG) −4.3%, Onto Innovation (ONTO) −4.1%, Lam Research (LRCX) −3.7%, Applied Materials (AMAT) −3.6%. The accelerator and hyperscale names were comparatively firm — Nvidia (NVDA) −1.5%, AMD −2.4%, CoreWeave (CRWV) −3.6% — while Micron (MU), Monday's leader, gave back 2.6% to $933.44. Broadcom (AVGO) held nearly flat at $369.68 into its own print.

The week's hinge is tomorrow: Broadcom's fiscal Q3 2026 earnings on September 3, the report that resets expectations across custom silicon and AI networking — and the direct read-through for Credo after tonight's numbers. Ecolab's ~$4.75B acquisition of liquid-cooling maker CoolIT is expected to close by quarter-end, consolidating the datacenter-thermal chokepoint, and SEMICON West returns to San Francisco October 13–15. The private-compute pipeline stays the long game: OpenAI's listing window is targeted to open in Q4 and Anthropic's pricing window sits in later 2026 — the events that would finally put public prices on the largest privately held nodes of the buildout.