NEW YORK — The Nasdaq Composite ended Tuesday at 19,847, down 0.8% from Monday’s close, in a session that had more texture than a single headline number could capture. Call it a pre-earnings rotation: investors selling what could disappoint — semiconductor hardware — and holding what has already delivered — cloud, software, AI applications. The dividing line ran almost exactly where you’d expect it to.
| Nasdaq Movers — August 26, 2026 | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|
| PLTR (Palantir) | $41.67 | +3.8% |
| MU (Micron) | $101.47 | +2.3% |
| AVGO (Broadcom) | $191.34 | +1.2% |
| MSFT (Microsoft) | $494.44 | +0.6% |
| META (Meta Platforms) | $607.44 | ~flat |
| AMZN (Amazon) | $258.98 | -0.8% |
| AAPL (Apple) | $234.67 | -0.9% |
| NVDA (Nvidia) | $210.95 | -1.0% |
| AMD | $176.38 | -1.4% |
| SNDK (SanDisk) | $58.34 | -1.6% |
| TSLA (Tesla) | $343.98 | -1.8% |
| INTC (Intel) | $22.84 | -2.1% |
NVIDIA, the index’s single largest influence by market capitalization, fell 1% to $210.95. The modest decline belied how much the company dominated the day’s attention. NVIDIA reports fiscal second-quarter 2027 earnings after Wednesday’s close, with consensus estimates calling for revenue of $92.2 billion, up 97.4% year-over-year, and earnings per share of $2.09. Those numbers, if met, would be among the largest quarterly results in semiconductor history. The market’s caution was not skepticism; it was positioning.
Against the NVIDIA-linked pressure, Tuesday produced some of the year’s sharpest counter-moves:
Palantir surged 3.8% to $41.67 after the US Army awarded the company a contract extension worth up to $618 million for its Maven Smart System AI battlefield platform. The contract — the largest AI software award in Army history — validated Palantir’s defense-first strategy and drove its year-to-date gain to approximately 74%.
Micron gained 2.3% to $101.47 as the company confirmed HBM3E memory orders are sold out through mid-2027. With every NVIDIA Blackwell GPU requiring eight stacks of high-bandwidth memory, Micron’s supply constraint is the market’s clearest reflection of genuine AI infrastructure demand.
Microsoft added 0.6% to $494.44 as Azure cloud revenue growth at 40% year-over-year for the third consecutive quarter demonstrated that software and cloud have decoupled from the hardware cycle’s near-term volatility.
Broadcom gained 1.2% to $191.34 as its custom AI accelerator backlog reached $12 billion, positioning the company as the primary alternative to NVIDIA for hyperscale AI silicon.
On the other side of the ledger:
Intel fell 2.1% to $22.84, the worst performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, after a Bernstein note updated Intel Foundry loss projections through 2027. The foundry unit posted a $2.8 billion operating loss in Q2.
Tesla fell 1.8% to $343.98 as rate sensitivity resurfaced and investors took profits following Monday’s gains. Tesla’s market capitalization sits at $1.38 trillion despite the decline, supported by robotaxi expansion optimism.
AMD dropped 1.4% to $176.38, absorbing the chip sector’s NVIDIA-driven caution despite its own MI325X accelerator shipping ahead of schedule.
Apple declined 0.9% to $234.67 on Taipei supply chain reports suggesting iPhone 17 Pro yields at TSMC were running below initial targets ahead of the September 9 product event.
Amazon slipped 0.8% to $258.98 after its second-quarter AWS growth of 37% — the fastest since 2021 — failed to sustain the immediate post-earnings enthusiasm.
SanDisk fell 1.6% to $58.34 as the six-month-old NAND spinoff continues to trade at a discount while investors assess the pace of the NAND price recovery.
The session’s volume told the same story as the price action. Nasdaq Composite volume reached approximately 5.2 billion shares — 18% above the 30-day average — consistent with repositioning ahead of a binary event rather than directional selling. Options market data from the CBOE showed elevated put buying in NVIDIA, AMD, and the QQQ ETF, suggesting professional investors were hedging rather than liquidating.
The Federal Reserve backdrop remains the other variable. Chairman Jerome Powell’s Jackson Hole address last Friday held to the path of two 25-basis-point cuts in 2026, with no urgency to accelerate. Rate-sensitive high-multiple growth names — which describe most of the Nasdaq 100 — got limited relief from that signal. The market needs actual cuts, not reiterated guidance about future cuts, to expand the multiple.
Wednesday will answer the question that Tuesday refused to answer. If NVIDIA beats consensus on revenue and data center metrics, the likely response is a sharp Nasdaq rally that erases Tuesday’s decline in the first hour of trading. If NVIDIA meets but does not beat — or if guidance disappoints — the pre-earnings caution will look prescient, and the Nasdaq 100’s 52-week high of 22,015 will be the index’s ceiling for longer than investors currently expect.
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