Chip Stocks Slide as Bond Yields Stay Elevated Heading Into Nvidia's Earnings Week

US equity futures opened the week lower as chip-stock weakness outweighed a modest pullback in Treasury yields, with the S&P 500 slipping about 0.3% and the Nasdaq Composite falling roughly 0.6-0.8%. The semiconductor sector continued a pullback that began the prior week when the 30-year Treasury yield hit a fresh 19-year high above 5.33% — a move analysts said had nothing to do with chip fundamentals and everything to do with the US fiscal deficit ($432.3 billion in July, the highest monthly total since March 2021) pushing the fiscal-year shortfall toward $1.8 trillion. Reports that prices of servers containing Nvidia's AI chips were rising more than 15% added to profit-taking in high-flying names like Intel and AMD, both up well over 100% year-to-date, as traders trimmed AI-hardware exposure ahead of Nvidia's Wednesday, August 26 earnings report — consensus estimates call for $93-95 billion in quarterly revenue, up roughly 67% year-over-year.