At the U.S. market open, chip stocks sold off sharply with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index opening down 3.8%, dragging SanDisk, Micron, Western Digital, SK Hynix and Nvidia lower, while the Dow rose 0.46% and the Nasdaq fell 1.29%.
The semiconductor sector is underperforming the broader market by a wide margin, with chip names falling much harder than the Dow, S&P 500 or Nasdaq as a whole. This sector-wide chip weakness tends to weigh more heavily on Nasdaq given its heavier chip-stock weighting than on the Dow, which is less exposed to semiconductors.