Tech Stocks Face $1 Trillion Wipeout as AI Spending Fears Hammer Wall Street

U.S. tech stocks sold off sharply on Friday, October 30, as disappointing results from Intel and Amazon deepened investor worries about the cost of building artificial intelligence infrastructure and how long it will take to pay off.

NBC News reported at 9:03 a.m. ET that the Nasdaq 100 was on course for a drop of more than $1 trillion in market value, after falling 3% in early trading. Reuters put the figure at just over $1 trillion if losses held. As of 11:40 a.m. ET, Yahoo Finance reported the Nasdaq Composite down 2.6%, the S&P 500 down 1.5% and the Dow down 0.7%. All figures are intraday and will change by the close. A market value loss is a drop in share prices, not money taken from investors’ accounts.

Intel and Amazon Lead Friday’s Selloff

Intel fell about 29% to 30% after it forecast fourth-quarter results below expectations and warned it would burn cash this year, citing weak PC demand, manufacturing problems, a memory shortage and heavy spending to expand production. Reuters said the stock was set for its biggest one-day loss on record, and the BBC estimated the drop would erase more than $130 billion in value.

Amazon was down about 2% to 4% in morning trading, after falling as much as 10% in after-hours trading on Thursday. It missed third-quarter revenue and earnings estimates, reported negative free cash flow for a second straight quarter and kept its 2026 capital spending forecast at about $220 billion. Chief executive Andy Jassy said Amazon expects to spend “meaningfully more” in 2027. Reuters estimated that Amazon and Intel together could lose about $200 billion in market value.

The Nasdaq 100 is also on track to shed more than $2 trillion in October, Reuters reported. That figure includes Friday’s drop and should not be added to it. The Nasdaq Composite was set for its first monthly decline in three months.

Alphabet’s Record Drop Set the Tone

The selloff followed Alphabet’s worst day on record on Thursday, October 29. Its Class A shares fell 12.6%, the biggest one-day drop since it began trading in 2004, wiping out roughly $500 billion in value. Fortune’s count was about $482 billion. NBC News said it was the second-largest one-day market value loss in U.S. history, behind Nvidia’s $589 billion drop in January 2025. The stock slipped about 1% more on Friday.

The trigger was Alphabet’s third-quarter report on Wednesday. Revenue and adjusted earnings missed estimates, search advertising grew 12% against analyst expectations of about 15%, and free cash flow was negative $9.07 billion, far below the roughly $2.7 billion analysts expected. Alphabet kept its 2026 capital spending forecast at $195 billion to $205 billion and said spending would rise significantly in 2027. Microsoft, which stayed cash-flow positive, rose.

Chips Slide as Bitcoin Drops After Binance Hack

The selloff spread to chipmakers. NBC News reported the Philadelphia semiconductor index down about 6%, and Reuters said AMD fell more than 9% and Nvidia 3%, while Dell and HP lost about 9% each. Reuters also noted that traders expect the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates by more than 50 basis points by mid-2027, which could make debt-funded AI spending harder to justify.

Not every analyst sees a turning point. “I don’t think this is a moment of reckoning,” Raymond James strategist Matt Orton told CNBC, adding that fundamentals remain in place even though positioning is crowded.

Yahoo Finance reported separately that Bitcoin fell more than 5% after a $6.3 billion hack at crypto exchange Binance. None of the reports reviewed link the Binance incident to the tech selloff. Clash Report has covered how hackers drained $6.3 billion from Binance in a 20-minute heist.