“PC load letter? What the f*ck does that mean?” - Michael Bolton Wall Street

Blood in the streets, you guys. Investors dumped pretty much anything that touches AI on Friday, and the Nasdaq tumbled 3% for its worst day since June. The tech-heavy index is now roughly 9% below its recent high. The S&P 500 slid 1.9%, and the Dow lost 633 points (-1.2%).

Starting with Intel, which got nuked 29%, flirting with its worst day since 1974. Perhaps you’ve heard? Q3 revenue ($16.5B) actually beat the company’s own forecast, but it guided Q4 to $15-16B with gross margin sinking to 38% (from 44.1%). Revenue in its client computing and physical AI group (whatever tf that means) fell 5% from a year ago to $8.1B, and per Intel’s bean counters, the PC slump should last “at least through the first half of next year.”

Turns out AI data centers are hoarding all the memory chips, so PC makers are jacking up laptop prices, and nobody’s biting. Fun fact: Uncle Sam, who owns roughly 10% of the company, is holding that bag too.

Friendly reminder, Intel was up about 150% in 2026 before the report, as Lip-Bu Tan, the VC-turned-CEO hired to save it, sold everyone on a comeback. Its 24% pop in April after a big Q1 beat had investors going from six to midnight. On Friday, it went right back to six. Benchmark’s Cody Acree summed it up on CNBC: the AI trade’s redheaded stepchild is “still PC dependent.” Sad.

As for the rest of Chipland, it also bled. Nvidia fell 4%, Broadcom lost 5%, and AMD dropped 11%. Even Sandisk, which sells the exact memory chips everyone’s hoarding, got its cheeks clapped (-13%), despite beating estimates for its fiscal first quarter and announcing an eight-for-one stock split.

As for Amazon, the online bookstore missed on Q3 earnings and revenue and posted negative free cash flow of $42.4B over the last 12 months (vs. +$14.8B a year earlier), which, holy sh*t. Shares were down more than 6% after hours Thursday.

So Amazon got crushed Friday, right? Right?! Nope. Shares lost just over 1%, with AWS growing 39% (its fastest pace in nearly five years). Andy Jassy is still mainlining every spare dollar into data centers, too. He kept his 2026 capex forecast at $220B and says 2027 will be “meaningfully higher.” Alphabet fell 12% Thursday partly over a similar capex binge (sup, Sundar).

Elsewhere, Wall Street got bricked up over Anthropic’s IPO filing on Monday. Fast forward to today, and per the Financial Times, Blackstone is telling investors that Anthropic’s debt will probably get a “high” junk rating after it goes public, walking back its earlier call for investment grade. The holdup is that Anthropic is structured as a public benefit corporation instead of a regular C-corp (read: the mission can legally outrank the money). A junk rating would shrink the pool of buyers, since plenty of insurers and pension funds can’t load up on junk debt.

It would also mean fatter interest payments for lenders… like Blackstone, which is helping lend Anthropic $63B for chips. Which, sus. So the hottest IPO of the year has a little junk in the trunk.

Oh so, risk-off then? Yep. Investors fled to the boomer defensive stocks, and consumer staples and healthcare actually gained. Walmart and Coca-Cola each added more than 1%, trimming the Dow’s losses, and fellow Dow members Merck and Amgen finished green too.

Regeneron, last seen face-planting on a failed COPD trial in May, jumped 11%. The drugmaker earned $20.07 a share (excluding items) on $5.12B in Q3 revenue, crushing the Street’s $16.42 and $4.56B, and raised its gross margin guidance. I mean, somebody had to put the team on its back, amirite? 

Point is, AI is starting to eat its own. The data centers are hoovering up so much memory that the PC business is starving, and the companies footing the bill are either burning cash to keep up or borrowing at junk rates to do it. For most of 2026, Wall Street bought the hype first and asked questions later. Friday was the questions.

And once the questions get hard, the money runs home to soda and groceries. As for Lip-Bu, somebody get that man some milk… 

Enjoy your weekend, friends! 

If you read all of this, congrats for having a 10 second attention span (better than me). As always, here’s our heatmap for today.

 

☕ Market Gossip

> Kushner’s Thrive Holdings to Buy ADT for $7.6 Billion in Cash (Bloomberg): Kush money.

> AWS will be a $1T business, Jassy says — but first, it will spend big (TechCrunch): You gotta spend money to lose make money…

> Chevron and Exxon beat earnings expectations as refining profits soar on high diesel fuel prices (CNBC): Big Diesel Energy.

> Chinese Executive Close to Nvidia CEO Suspected of Giving China Information (Wall Street Journal): Two Huangs don’t make a right.

 

“WTF” Meme of the Day

“Who’s laughing now?” -Michael Burry, currently down 49% this year on Lululemon

 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Intel, Amazon, Google, Merck, and Coca-Cola as mentioned in the article.