Intel loses almost 30 percent in a single day as the Nasdaq slides nearly 3 percent

Wall Street had a heavy session on Friday. The Nasdaq lost 2.86 percent and now stands more than 8 percent below its record from early October, La Libre reports, citing AFP. The S&P 500 fell 1.82 percent and the Dow Jones 1.09 percent. According to De Tijd, it was the tech-heavy index's worst day since June; De Morgen and HLN also report on the blows to tech stocks. Alphabet, Intel, Amazon and Meta together lost about 1,000 billion dollars in market value over the past few days, De Tijd calculates.

The biggest hit was to Intel, which closed 28.58 percent lower. According to De Tijd, it was the chipmaker's worst trading day in more than forty years. Its third-quarter results were actually decent: revenue rose 21 percent to 16.5 billion dollars, Trends reports, with strong growth in AI and data centres, according to Business AM. But Intel expects only 15 to 16 billion dollars in fourth-quarter revenue, while analysts had counted on 17 billion. A shortage of memory chips is making PCs more expensive and weighing on demand; Intel predicts the PC market will shrink 12 percent this year and a further 10 percent next year, Business AM writes.

Amazon fell almost 6 percent during the day but closed 1.41 percent lower. Its AWS cloud unit grew 39 percent, but its AI investment now exceeds what its operations generate, forcing the company to borrow, La Libre writes. Other chip companies also tumbled: AMD lost almost 11 percent, Nvidia more than 4 percent, and PC makers HP and Dell fell by around 10 percent. Investors are asking ever more loudly whether the billions invested in AI will ever pay off.

In Europe the damage was limited. The Bel20 closed 0.01 percent higher at 5,840.99 points, supported by Proximus and a rebound in AB InBev, La Libre reports. De Tijd reports that chip company X-Fab did take a heavy hit. Frankfurt lost 0.85 percent, while Paris and London closed virtually unchanged.