9AM Hour: Global Sell-Off: Tech Pain as Kospi plummets 10%, Chips Tumble 6/23/26

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Jim Cramer (0:41)

It's Jim Cramer here. You're listening to the opening bell of CNBC Squawk on the Street. Don't miss a minute of the action.

Carl Quintanilla (0:49)

Good Tuesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with David Faber, Sara Eisen at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Cramer is off today. Global markets on the lookout for signs of AI exhaustion as the Cospi falls 10 percent overnight in South Korea. Biggest drop in three months. SpaceX dips below its opening price from IPO day.

Rick Santelli (1:06)

Oil below 74

Carl Quintanilla (1:08)

The president says 19 million barrels crossed the straight yesterday. Goldman does cut its Q4 bread forecast to 80

Our roadmap begins with this intensifying tech route. Chipstock's joining the pullback. Memory names tumbling as the global sell-off rages on.

David Faber (1:23)

Plus, always keeping an eye on private credit this morning or late yesterday. Polo Curb withdrawals and its main retail-focused private credit fund that, after exit requests, hit about 17% of the assets.

Sara Eisen (1:34)

And SpaceX set for its fourth down session in a row, wiping out more than $900 billion now in market value and trading around its IPO opening price of $150 a share.

Carl Quintanilla (1:46)

Let's begin with this global sell-off. Talk about what happened in South Korea overnight, one of their biggest drops in several months. Names like SK Hynix and Samsung down about 12%.

We've been talking about how toward their gains have been so far this year, of course.

Sara Eisen (1:59)

Right. When it goes the other way, it's very painful. And this at a time where I think it's important to mention that margin debt, basically borrowing to buy stocks this month in South Korea hit a record high, $38.5 trillion won, which is about $25 billion. So you hit things like forced liquidations when stocks go the other way. It also comes just a day after SK Hynix overtook Samsung, its competitor in South Korea, as the most highly valued stock in the country. That is a title that Samsung has held basically since 2000

So it is super crowded. There was also a local report that people were reading into that SK Hynix, David, is adjusting the pace of production for its high bandwidth memory for chips, stepping up efforts in the DRAM instead, which is maybe a profitability issue. Anything where investors can sort of glom on to a narrative that, uh-oh, maybe things are petering out or not towing in demand, maybe that's...

David Faber (2:59)

But it's not clear that we're seeing anything that truly is reflective of that, of undermining the overall growth of the AI ecosystem in the sense of spending being cut back. That is not... I don't know, Carl, you went... I haven't seen anything. Is there any real evidence you could cite?

Carl Quintanilla (3:17)

Well, I'm just thinking of Google yesterday, which was a big story, as the AI race starts to... The narrative gets re... No, I think my point was yesterday, we talked to Dan Niles, a good example, who said the current picture does look good. But if memory prices are rolling over, if the share of language models is beginning to shift, what does hyperscaler guidance look like? If we get earnings in a few weeks? That's what I think people are looking forward to.

David Faber (3:44)

Yeah. I mean, I think we will sit here, as we have already for years, and continue to question whether or not there will ever be a return on all the invested capital. And I think that's kind of what you're sort of getting to. And I understand the losses we've seen in alphabet shares over the last couple of days have been noticeable. Obviously, they've lost a couple of key executives. They have not come at the same pace with new models as their competitors at Anthropic or OpenAI. I think that's something investors are worried about. But I have yet to see, if there was truly somebody's, one of the hyperscalers saying, you know what, we're not going to, we're cutting back on our CapEx next year, which is obviously not the case. In fact, you see Oracle's annual report. All they're talking about cutting back on is potentially the workforce to try to continue to create efficiencies that allow them to spend even more on a CapEx budget that is going as far exceed the 55 billion they spent last year. And you know, so we have seen days like this in the past, I guess, is my point, where there does seem to be concern. You see the weakness in a key market or a key area. We are coming up on Micron earnings, which by the way, the last time they reported the stock went down, what, six, seven days in a row.