Saturday, October 31, 2026 · 1:12 AM ET
Markets
A broad tech rout intensified Friday after megacap earnings misses, with the Nasdaq sliding more than 2% and roughly $900bn wiped from Big Tech. Investors are increasingly questioning the payoff from the surging AI and data-center spending at Alphabet, Amazon and Meta.
Earnings
Intel forecast lower-than-expected PC-chip sales and shrinking margins, sending shares toward their worst single-day drop since 1974 and erasing much of this year's rally.
Earnings
Amazon came under pressure after a weaker-than-hoped holiday-quarter sales forecast and a warning on soaring capital spending, even as AWS cloud growth stayed strong. The slide added to the day's AI-spending anxiety across tech.
Markets
The cost of protecting against defaults on debt tied to Big Tech's AI borrowing boom jumped to fresh highs on worries about ballooning supply and thinning profits, a sign credit markets are turning wary of the AI capex spree.
Crypto
Binance halted withdrawals after confirming a record $6.3bn crypto theft and said it plans to cover customer losses. The breach rattled digital-asset markets, with Bitcoin down about 5% and prediction market Polymarket also halting trading.
Earnings
Reddit shares plunged roughly 28% following its third-quarter results as a sharp drop in search-referral traffic — a major driver of its user growth — alarmed investors already worried that AI-driven changes to Google search are throttling referrals to the platform.
Earnings
Twilio sank around 17% even though third-quarter revenue rose 20% to $1.56 billion, beat estimates and the company lifted its full-year outlook. Investors focused instead on a cautious fourth-quarter growth and profit outlook and a stretched valuation.
Markets
Apple reclaimed the title of world's most valuable company on Friday as investors sought the perceived safety of the iPhone maker amid AI-spending jitters, reaching a market value of about $5.03 trillion versus Nvidia's $4.93 trillion. It is the first time Apple has topped Nvidia since briefly doing so in late July.
AI
Amazon set up supplier financing arrangements to borrow as much as $80 billion against the hardware it buys, its latest move to preserve financial flexibility while spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure. The facility supplements the cash flow and record corporate bond sales it has used to fund data centers and chips.
AI
The five largest data-center players - Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle - have together committed more than $3 trillion to AI infrastructure over the coming years, spanning leases, buildings, energy and equipment. The disclosures underscore how aggressively Big Tech is funding the AI build-out even as investors question the payoff.
Chips
Japanese NAND flash maker Kioxia guided to quarterly operating profit of about 2 trillion yen ($12.7bn), below estimates, warning that the AI-fueled surge in memory-chip prices is fading after several blistering quarters. Its average NAND selling price rose a mid-20% last quarter, down from 70% the quarter before.
IPO
Africa-focused fintech OPay, backed by SoftBank, priced its New York IPO at $19 a share - the bottom of its guided range - valuing the payments company at about $4 billion. It sold 16 million American depositary shares, with an over-allotment option for underwriters open through Nov. 2.
AI
Public pension plans in Orange County, Los Angeles, Massachusetts and South Carolina are positioned for sizeable payouts from Anthropic's anticipated IPO, giving public employees an early stake in the AI boom. The gains would land well before proposals for a sovereign AI wealth fund take shape.
AI · Bloomberg
AI inference startup Baseten is set to raise a new round that more than doubles its valuation to about $30 billion, structured in two tranches at $26 billion and $30 billion, according to people familiar. It is a sign investors are still writing large checks to AI-infrastructure names even amid the week's tech selloff.
Markets · Bloomberg
S&P Global Ratings lowered its outlook on Meta's AA- credit rating to negative, an early step toward a possible downgrade within two years, citing rising leverage and the balance-sheet pressure from Meta's elevated AI spending.
AI · WSJ
OpenAI has secured only about $11 billion of the $30 billion it initially sought for its latest round as AI-trade jitters cooled investor appetite, valuing the company at roughly $1.25 trillion, below the $1.4 trillion it had hoped to reach.
AI
Blackstone said Anthropic is now expected to receive a high junk credit rating after its planned IPO, a shift from earlier guidance, raising fresh questions about the AI company's borrowing costs and financial profile as it prepares to go public.