10AM Hour: Memory Stocks Fall, Google’s AI Leadership Shakeup, Chime & Dutch Bros CEOs on Earnings 8/6/26

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**Carl Quintanilla** (1:00)
Good Thursday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Steve Momodi here at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. David and Sara are off today. Got some mixed trading in the early going this morning. The Dow set another record close, although parts of tech today lagging notably, including some memory and some software. We're going to get into both. Two interviews you don't want to miss this morning on the back of earnings. The head of FinTech company, Chime, is with us, jumping higher on results. It's almost a 52-week high. And we'll talk to the CEO of Dutch Bros, falling this morning despite a beat. Also ahead, we'll discuss the big shakeup at Google that's raising some questions about the company's position in the AI arms race.

**Seema Mody** (1:37)
But first, wholesale inventories just crossing. Let's get to Rick Santelli with those numbers. Rick?

**Rick Santelli** (1:44)
Yes, there's some surprises here. On the wholesale inventory side, we are adjusting a mid-month read, so the June final read now moves from up 3 tenths to only up 2 tenths. And what's interesting about that is, that would be the lightest read going back to Jan when it was negative. Now, let's look at sales. And this is a fresh June number, down 3 percent. I had to look at this one twice. That's a pretty big move. Down 3 percent would be the biggest trade sales drop on a month-over-month basis, going all the way back to, wow, to April of 2020 We all know that was COVID related. And that was the biggest drop at minus almost 17
So this is indeed a surprising drop, minus 3 percent. And we haven't even had a negative number in this series since the third quarter of last year. So rather dramatic on the sales side for June. We want to continue to monitor that, of course. And interest rates have moved up just a smidge, flattening the curve. Two years are up 3, 10 years are up 1, oil's up a little bit. And we had an improvement in productivity. Turned around positive. Unit labor costs came in less than expected.
Carl, back to you.

**Carl Quintanilla** (2:58)
All right, Rick, thanks so much. Rick Santelli. Let's get to some of these moves in the memory market this morning. Western Dig and SanDisk weighing on the NDX after getting hit on results. Our Christina Parts-Nevalos joins us with more on what this picture looks like this morning. Hey, KP.

**Christina Partesides** (3:13)
Hi, Carl. Well, the AI storage trade just really hit a wall today. Western Digital and SanDisk both posted record revenue just late yesterday. And yet, both stocks selling off anyway, each falling. Well, you can see SanDisk now giving back a little bit down 8 percent, but originally it was down 10 percent. Start with Western Digital, though. This is the hard drive maker. The quarter beat, but its profit margin guidance came in below rival Seagate. And its storage shipment growth has pretty much slowed from recent quarters. And that was enough to knock the stock down. SanDisk, on the other hand, is a flash memory maker. Think NAND memory that we often talk about. And it had a similar problem. Record revenue, but a guide for roughly flat margins and only modest price hikes when investors really wanted to knock out. Some analysts think SanDisk specifically is lowballing. That prices are climbing faster than its guidance suggests. And SanDisk actually holds an investor day next week on August 13th, which could potentially reset sentiment. So they're just maybe being a little bit conservative right now. But this isn't necessarily just about the two stocks I'm talking about. These are momentum names. When they break, they've dragged down the whole memory group with them. Seagate, Rival, Micron also falling in sympathy today, even though Micron makes completely different ships like high bandwidth memory, more within the DRAM category. And then you also need to throw in a drop in AMD after its earnings, which were really, really strong. And yet the stock dropped. You start to see a pattern. As Wedbush put it in her note today, results clearing a high bar still aren't clearing investor expectations. But the pros don't seem that worried about all of them equally.