Semiconductor Stocks Fall as Intel Earnings Trigger Broad Tech Selloff

By Connor Hart

Semiconductor shares broadly fell following disappointing results and a downbeat outlook from Intel, along with an earnings miss from Amazon, which fueled fresh concerns around the artificial intelligence trade.

The selloff rippled across the sector, hitting equipment manufacturers, foundries and analog suppliers. Broadcom shares opened Friday's regular session about 4% lower, while Advanced Micro Devices plunged nearly 10%. Shares of Micron Technology slipped 5.5%.

The rout follows Intel's earnings on Thursday, when the company gave soft fourth-quarter guidance and forecast a prolonged slowdown in personal-computer sales, mostly because of high memory-chip prices.

Intel's stock lost more than a quarter of its value Friday, erasing about $120 billion from the company's market capitalization.

Wafer fab equipment makers were down, with Applied Materials down nearly 5% and Lam Research slipping 5.5%. The sector is susceptible to chipmakers' concerns over spending and memory and logic spending cuts.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm was trading lower in sympathy with broader wireless and handset demand with fears over enterprise hardware sluggishness and smartphone demand bottlenecks.

The chip pullback comes after a bruising week for Big Tech and AI stocks. Over the past week, investors became uneasy following earnings reports from Alphabet, Amazon and Meta Platforms, which fueled concerns about the payoff from AI-infrastructure spending.

Alphabet's stock suffered its worst day on record Thursday, losing roughly $500 million in market value, after the tech giant said Google's search revenue growth waned due to the less lucrative nature of AI searches.

Meanwhile, shares of Amazon were about 4.5% lower on Friday, after the company's third-quarter revenue and net income missed analysts' estimates. Overall free cash flow plunged to a $42.4 billion outflow.

The reports came on the heels of Meta, which last week said it plans to continue spending "aggressively" on AI. The company unveiled plans to raise up to $95 billion in waves of stock offerings to fund its unending AI investments, including creating a new class of nonvoting stock in an at-the-market stock offering program of up to $60 billion.

Meta's free cash flow also went into negative territory for the first time since it became a public company last week, although analysts had expected a stronger downturn.

The company reported negative free cash flow of $2.1 billion versus analyst projections of negative $9.4 billion.

Write to Connor Hart at connor.hart@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 30, 2026 09:58 ET (13:58 GMT)