The AI bubble cracks: Big Tech burns a trillion dollars in one day
The Nasdaq 100 was on track to lose over a trillion dollars on Friday as Intel crashed nearly 30%, a day after Google shed around $500 billion.
Friday, October 30 was a brutal day for America's tech giants. By midday the Nasdaq 100 was on track to lose more than a trillion dollars of market value in a single session, after falling 3% at the open, its worst day since mid-June. The Nasdaq Composite was down about 2.2%, the S&P 500 about 1.2%, and tech was by far the weakest sector, down roughly 3.5%.
Intel took the hardest hit. Its shares plunged nearly 30%, the worst day in the company's history, wiping out more than $130 billion in value. CFO David Zinsner warned that Intel will burn more cash than it brings in this year and that the PC slowdown will last at least through the first half of next year. We already covered the after-hours drop, but by the opening bell things got a lot worse.
The rest of the chip sector followed. AMD fell more than 9%, Nvidia around 3%, Dell and HP about 9% each. Amazon slipped several percent: it posted negative free cash flow for a second straight quarter, yet still stuck to roughly $220 billion in capital spending for 2026, mostly on AWS, and promised to spend meaningfully more in 2027.
A day earlier Alphabet had the worst day in its history. The stock dropped about 13% and Google lost around $500 billion in value, the second-largest wipeout ever recorded. The company admitted its own AI answers in search are eating into ad revenue and that AI spending had pushed its cash flow negative. Reddit crashed 26% on top of that, blaming Google's AI search for cutting off its traffic.
The investor logic is simple. The giants are borrowing and spending hundreds of billions on AI data centers, and clear returns are nowhere in sight. Some big customers have already cut their token budgets. The one exception was Microsoft, which reported strong cash flow and saw its stock rise.
Whether this is the bubble bursting, the market hasn't decided yet. But for the first time in the whole AI boom, the words "we will spend even more" are triggering panic on Wall Street instead of a rally.
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