Intel and Amazon results trigger broad tech retreat
Wall Street closed sharply lower Friday, and the Nasdaq recorded its biggest one-day percentage fall since June 5. Investors reacted to quarterly results from Intel and Amazon, released late Thursday, which sharpened doubts about the scale of spending on artificial intelligence across the technology sector. The tech-heavy index now sits 7.8% below the record closing high it reached on Oct. 6.[S1][S2][S3]
Intel was the session's most visible casualty, with its shares dropping 28.6%. Amazon trimmed its losses as trading continued, but the pair's results set the tone for the day. All three major U.S. benchmarks ended lower for the week, and both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq finished October with monthly declines, while the Dow closed the month higher.[S1]
Chipmakers and server builders slide together
Semiconductor shares fell hard across the board. Nvidia lost 4.2% and AMD dropped 10.9%, while the broader semiconductor index gave up 7.2% and headed toward a monthly decline exceeding 15%. Server manufacturers were hit as well, with Dell down 10.8% and HP down 9.6%, extending the damage beyond chip designers to the hardware makers tied to data-center buildouts.[S1]
Oliver Pursche, a senior vice president at Wealthspire Advisors in New York, framed the week as a test of what AI's commercial future holds — specifically whether the spending will pay off and how soon. In his view, firms that live up to the sector's high hopes are being rewarded, while those that miss the mark or stumble in execution are being punished by the market.[S1]
Indexes, earnings season and other movers
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 572.25 points, or 1.09%, to 51,770.31. The S&P 500 lost 140.32 points, or 1.82%, to 7,580.07, and the Nasdaq Composite shed 747.73 points, or 2.86%, to 25,437.00. The S&P 500 technology sector recorded its largest monthly percentage loss since March 2025, and communication services had its biggest monthly drop since April 2022.[S1]
More than half of S&P 500 companies have now reported third-quarter results, with 299 having done so and 82% beating analysts' consensus expectations, according to LSEG. Analysts expect year-over-year earnings growth of 31.6% for the quarter. Exxon Mobil and Chevron both exceeded profit forecasts, gaining 2.2% and 2.8%, as energy supply disruptions linked to the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and Russia's war in Ukraine lifted margins.[S1]
Starbucks slipped 1.8% after forecasting an annual revenue decline tied to the divestiture of its Chinese business. Crypto-linked firms Coinbase, Strategy and Robinhood fell between 7.2% and 10.6% after reports that hackers took $6.3 billion from Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange. Decliners outnumbered advancers 1.8-to-1 on the New York Stock Exchange and 3.03-to-1 on the Nasdaq, and U.S. trading volume reached 19.87 billion shares against a 20-day average of 17.26 billion.[S1]
