US tech stocks slide as AI spending spree rattles investors
US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears
A selloff hit Wall Street as investors balked at the soaring costs of the AI buildout. Intel plunged as much as 30% after warning of a weaker PC market while ramping up AI spending, Amazon fell 6% on soft earnings, and Reddit dropped 26% as Google's AI search ate into referral traffic. Alphabet lost over $500bn earlier in the week. Analysts see "significant growing pains" across the sector.
The thinking is that these signs suggest that the entire sector is going to slow down.
- Animats
That's sort of a random heading put on reports of Q3 earnings.
The big news is "Alphabet shares record their worst day ever, shedding $500 billion in value"[1] Google ad revenue has dropped. AI results from search engines don't generate the click-through revenue that search ads did. That's scary for Google management.
Roblox reports user counts are down. Reddit traffic is down and management blames AI search not referring users to Reddit. None of this seems to be closely related to AI costs.
That's losing the competition for attention.
Intel reports PC sales are down. That's likely related to RAM costs, which made price/performance of new PCs drop.
There are issues with AI costs, but they don't seem to be the cause of these reported Q3 earnings drops.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/alphabet-google-sto...
- cmiles8
The market is going to react badly to even the slightest hint of a slowdown on AI. The whole AI space is so heavily leveraged up with debt and VC cash at the moment that even a slight slowdown will cause the whole thing to collapse in a financial $hitstorm the likes of which we’ve not seen in a while.
Theres “big bets” and then there’s heavily leveraged bet the farm with leveraged debt. The first one hurts when it pops. The second one wipes people out.
- WarOnPrivacy
Intel's finance chief David Zinsner said the firm did not expect to
bring in more cash than it spent this year, and forecast
lower-than-expected revenue for its fourth quarter.
You could have manufactured enough ARC video cards to meet demand. Going forward, you could manufacture solutions to bring local LLM options closer to affordability.
If you're into manufacturing stuff people really want, that is.
- taeric
How much of this is the current uncertainty over politics in the US? With the incredibly frustrating aspect that we can't really directly discuss exactly how corrupt a few of the main actors have been, to date.
And the oddest fear is precisely what will happen if we start trying to ramp up a bit of what used to be normal accountability?
- tjohnell
How come I never see these threads when Nasdaq has a banger of a day? Stocks fall faster than they rise - it's not useful discourse to panic every time there's a correction. Give it a few days and we'll be back where we were.
- yalogin
The main takeaway is investors are really spooked and any negative news is amplified in the stock sell off
- itanalot
Windows will soon lose the normie consumer market, and all that's left for them will be gamers (of which they will make zero dollars from) and enterprise (of which their successes will broadly match laptop job employment figures)
- vanuatu
How much of these falls are due to the AI buildout as a whole vs. AI disrupting certain business models?
More agents browsing the web and people relying on AI summaries -> less revenue for Google Search and Reddit
AI drastically reducing the barrier to game dev -> less users on Roblox