Friday’s stock session was being priced as a question about AI infrastructure, not as a generic down day. The bill for data centers, chips and power is arriving before investors can see a matching return, and the names carrying that spending were the ones moving.
The New York Post, in a report time-stamped 7:34 a.m. Pacific, said the Nasdaq Composite had plunged about 2 percent. That is a morning reading. The cash session was still open, so it is not a closing print. West Coast News is filing this account at 11:00 a.m. PT on those reported figures.
Amazon fell 1.9 percent, the Post reported, after revenue of $201.9 billion and net income of $20.7 billion both missed Wall Street estimates. The Post also reported negative free cash flow of $42.4 billion. Amazon Web Services, the cloud unit, grew 39 percent to $46 billion, which the Post described as the division’s strongest growth in years. That was not enough, in the Post’s account, to offset worry over spending: Amazon reaffirmed a 2026 capital-expenditure forecast of $220 billion.
Intel was the sharp single-stock move. The Post said the shares plummeted 29 percent even though revenue rose 21 percent to $13.7 billion. Data-center and AI revenue jumped 78 percent to $7.3 billion, the Post reported, while the client-computing and physical-AI group fell 5 percent to $8.1 billion and global PC shipments dropped 4 percent from a year earlier. Intel’s outlook, as the Post reported it, is adjusted earnings of 25 cents a share this quarter on revenue of $15 billion to $16 billion, against an analyst estimate of $17.1 billion.
The Post reported that chief financial officer David Zinsner said, “We see the PC slowdown continuing at least through the first half of next year,” tying the weakness to high prices and shortages of parts that are also used in the AI build-out.
Alphabet’s damage was mostly Thursday’s, in the same report. The Post said the company shed more than $500 billion of market value in its worst single-day decline, after AI chatbot searches cut into its traditional search business. On Friday, the Post said, Alphabet fell a further 1 percent. The Post did not give a percentage for Thursday’s drop, and this desk is not supplying one.
Taken together, the morning tape was a market arguing about payback: how long heavy AI capital spending can run ahead of cash. Companies weighing their own spending can compare that question with a one-time AI readiness audit or the tools listed in the ARQS shop.
