Tech sell-off drives US markets down by nearly $3tn – The end of the AI "bubble"?

A sell-off of tech stocks that began earlier this month and gained steam with disappointing earnings from leading tech companies drove US markets down by hundreds of billions of dollars Friday. In total, the decline has knocked nearly $1tn in value off the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange in one week and erased about $2tn in a month, The Guardian shows.

The S&P 500, the index of the 500 most valuable companies in the US, fell by more than 1% Friday, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. It was on track to erase its gain for October, even though it set its all-time high during the same month. The weakness for technology stocks dragged the Nasdaq composite down even further, more than 3%, also erasing hundreds of billions in value.

More than $2tn in market value is set to be wiped from the Nasdaq ⁠100 this month, as big tech earnings intensified investor scrutiny of whether the billions being poured into artificial intelligence can generate returns quickly enough.

⁠The index has fallen ⁠more than 5.8% so far in October as the AI trade ran into turbulence, with hyperscalers Meta Platforms, Alphabet and Amazon raising spending forecasts further as they race to expand AI infrastructure.

Intel tumbled nearly 30% and is flirting with its worst day since 1974.

Amazon fell 1.8% after reporting a weaker profit for the summer than analysts expected. A day earlier, Alphabet’s stock dropped more than 12%, wiping $500bn from its market capitalization, to its worst day on record after telling investors that it burned through more cash during the summer than the spring because of similar, mammoth investments in AI.

A drop of 3.1% for Nvidia, previously worth about $5tn, whose chips have made it the poster child of the AI frenzy, was the heaviest force pulling the S&P 500 downward.

Worries are rising about whether all those hundreds of billions of dollars will produce enough profit and productivity to make AI investment worth it. At the same time, stocks of computer chip companies and other winners from the frenzy to build AI datacenters have come under pressure on concerns that high interest rates may slow the further build out of data centers.

Such losses overshadowed an otherwise mixed day for the rest of Wall Street, with the S&P 500 roughly evenly split between gainers and losers.

The stock exchanges of the United States, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, China and Taiwan fell by $1.7 trillion, gold and silver fell by $1 trillion, and crypto collapsed by $140 billion. Investors lost almost $3 trillion in one day – 31 October.

— Intel lost 31%;

— Reddit lost 30%;

— Roblox lost 20%;

— Illumina lost 19%;

— SanDisk lost 15%;

— Arm lost 12.7%;

— Dell lost 12.5%;

— Google lost 12.29%.

Meanwhile, in China, the local stock market has been all but decimated. Shares of thousands of companies are falling. The collapse has already reached 1.4 trillion yuan. Some AI companies have plummeted by as much as 80%.

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