US stocks give up the gains as memory and chip names slide

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The S&P 500 and Nasdaq are both now negative on the day as technology and computer chips in particular sag.The fear is that Micron will report some sort of slowdown in AI demand in today's report after the bell. Shares of the company have surged at a frenzied pace in the past six months and any cracks in the stock could break the dam.Micron itself is down 2.5% after falling by 10% yesterday and trading out a top-ish technical pattern.The risk in the day ahead is that even on a strong earnings report and pop, it could run into resistance at the high of $1213 and inspire more profit taking.Other memory names will certainly follow Micron's lead and are showing the same angst today:Western Digital lags the S&P 500 with a 6.2% fallSeagate -6.0%Oracle -5.5%Freeport-McMoran -5.0%Dow Chemical -4.8%QCOM -4.8%Other notable laggards:NVDA -0.9%TSLA -1.5%AMZN +2.3%MSFT -0.7%FDX -1.6% (after earnings)BKNG +8.4% as travel names rally on lower oilThis is a fairly rapid turnaround after a strong rally midway through the session. There was similar choppy trading earlier in the week and last week's hawkish Fed still looms large. The big thing is AI though, which is the dominant theme in markets and there is a sense that at some point the insane pace of capex will have to slow. If that's not due to poor ROI, it could be due to bottlenecks in construction that are making it nearly impossible to put up data centers as quickly In terms of the chart, there's not reason to worry until 25,000 breaks but if that happens, it could get ugly quickly. This article was written by Adam Button at investinglive.com.