The Nasdaq-100 was on track to erase more than $1 trillion in value in a single session, with cascading selloffs across technology stocks amplified by a record-breaking cryptocurrency theft.
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) bore the sharpest blow, with shares plummeting more than 27% in premarket trading, putting the chipmaker on course for the worst single-day stock decline in its entire history.
The company projected fourth-quarter revenue of between $15.0 billion and $16.0 billion, a range that fell well short of what investors had hoped to see from the struggling semiconductor giant.
CEO Lip-Bu Tan flagged mounting pressure on the personal-computer industry as a key drag, warning that weakening CPU demand and elevated memory prices could persist well into the first half of 2027.
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) compounded the damage, with its shares dropping 6.5% after the company’s holiday-quarter sales forecast came in below Wall Street expectations, stoking fresh concerns about consumer spending.
The e-commerce and cloud giant did report strong underlying numbers, with AWS revenue climbing 39% to $46.0 billion and operating income rising to $28.1 billion from $17.4 billion in the prior-year period, but investors focused on the cautious outlook.
The combined market capitalization losses for Intel and Amazon alone were approaching $200 billion, dragging down the wider technology sector with them.
Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) dropped 3.7% and AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) slid roughly 10%, while the broader chip index shed 7%, with server manufacturers Dell and HP falling 10.4% and 8.7% respectively.
The S&P 500 information technology index tumbled 3.9%, its steepest single-day decline since June 23, while the S&P 500 as a whole fell 1.6%, the Nasdaq composite lost 2.5%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average slid 0.7%.
All three major indexes were heading for weekly losses, with the Nasdaq also set to snap a two-month winning streak that had extended through October.
A separate shock arrived from the cryptocurrency markets, where Bitcoin prices fell more than 5% after Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, disclosed a hack affecting $6.3 billion in funds, with an additional $3 billion frozen, marking the largest theft of its kind on record.
A U.S.-based blockchain intelligence firm pointed to a North Korean unit as the likely perpetrator behind the Binance attack, adding a geopolitical dimension to an already turbulent trading session.
Underlying the technology selloff was a deepening investor debate over whether the enormous sums being channeled into artificial intelligence infrastructure would ever generate returns commensurate with the outlay.
Joe Saluzzi, co-manager of trading at Themis Trading, captured the sentiment bluntly: “A lot of them kind of got ahead of themselves. It’s all earnings based and right now, they’re not producing.”
The session underscored a broader reckoning for the AI trade, as markets begin demanding evidence that hundreds of billions of dollars in spending commitments will translate into meaningful profits.
