Storage-chip names have tumbled more than 20% in recent weeks after peaking in late June, industry participants said. Meta’s sale of compute capacity stoked fears of excess compute and triggered a sectorwide pullback; SanDisk, Micron, Seagate and Western Digital are among leaders down over 20%. Traders note the industry’s long-standing cycle—capacity broadside expansion in booms, price collapses and industrywide losses, then capex retrenchment and eventual recovery—remains intact. Analysts say t

Storage-chip names have tumbled more than 20% in recent weeks after peaking in late June, industry participants said. Meta’s sale of compute capacity stoked fears of excess compute and triggered a sectorwide pullback; SanDisk, Micron, Seagate and Western Digital are among leaders down over 20%. Traders note the industry’s long-standing cycle—capacity broadside expansion in booms, price collapses and industrywide losses, then capex retrenchment and eventual recovery—remains intact. Analysts say the key variable now is whether technical gaps between AI large models continue to narrow, which would materially affect incremental storage demand. Separately, commercial dynamics are shifting: cloud providers and AI data centers are increasingly signing three- to five-year supply agreements with price bands, minimum purchase commitments and customer deposits to secure critical supply, replacing shorter-term, spot or quarterly contracting.