US Tech Stocks See Sharp Falls As AI Spending Nears $1 Trillion (bbc.com) 61
U.S. technology stocks plunged for a second consecutive day on Friday as investors grew increasingly concerned about the enormous cost of artificial intelligence development and whether those investments will pay off. The Nasdaq fell more than 3.5%, while Intel shares dropped as much as 30%, Reddit fell 26%, and Alphabet extended its losses after shedding more than $500 billion in market value Thursday. The BBC notes that Meta, Alphabet, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft have collectively committed to spending $800.6 billion on AI in 2026. From the report: Chris Low, from investment management firm FHN Financial, said the bulk of what was happening in the stock market was in reaction to some of the biggest tech players such as Amazon and Google. He told Reuters the companies were "showing some pretty significant growing pains as they aggressively pursue the AI build-out." "The thinking is that these signs suggest that the entire sector is going to slow down."
Kathleen Brookes, research director at trading firm XTB, said there have been many ups and downs in AI trade in recent months. "Investors have turned ruthless, punishing any signs of disappointment in [third quarter] earnings," she said. "The AI trade has had a good run in recent years, but now investors want payback, and companies like Alphabet and Intel are in the crosshairs." [...] Brookes noted that November is typically a strong month for stocks. "If we see AI stocks continue to struggle in the coming days, it could suggest the AI trade is past its peak, and investors will be looking for a new theme to drive markets," she said.
Kathleen Brookes, research director at trading firm XTB, said there have been many ups and downs in AI trade in recent months. "Investors have turned ruthless, punishing any signs of disappointment in [third quarter] earnings," she said. "The AI trade has had a good run in recent years, but now investors want payback, and companies like Alphabet and Intel are in the crosshairs." [...] Brookes noted that November is typically a strong month for stocks. "If we see AI stocks continue to struggle in the coming days, it could suggest the AI trade is past its peak, and investors will be looking for a new theme to drive markets," she said.
What a waste of money (Score:2)
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Mod parent (FP) Funny, but I think you're missing the point. My hilarious theory is that China is crashing their own stock market in hopes of triggering a crash in the American stock market. When it crashes far enough Xi will suddenly jump in and buy control of TSMC. How to win without even trying (to invade).
File it under "celebrating the election"? And no, I don't really understand how "sell triggers" work. The stock market has become a game for bigger suckers than me.
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You're so cute when you think the dangerous AI in China is visible to the public. Ditto in America.
But I wasn't actually joking about Xi buying control of Taiwan. I do think they have military contingency plans with clouds of drones to enforce a virtual embargo, but much less expensive to just outplay the suckers. The "US Tech Stocks" are just collateral damage from that perspective. (If Xi could control the YOB the way Putin does, then I would guess about some American targets for the stop-loss triggers. D
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I'd argue that generative and automation AI is more dangerous than the military kind, in terms of jobs disrupted, loss of privacy, and proliferation of disinformation. WW3 would be terrible, but mass death isn't the only bad outcome - a utopia with loss of human agency and purpose might actually be worse.
Also, Taiwan is a useful boogeyman for the Chinese government to rally their own people, as well as to use to threaten the West. I'm not at all convinced that China wants to actually do the deed, vs havin
Re: What a waste of money (Score:2)
No oneâ(TM)s going to save Taiwan. I hope we have contingency plans to spirit away the smartest/ wealthiest chip guys. Other than that, itâ(TM)s over.
Aircraft carriers? Are you nuts. How many aerodromes in the PRC are within range of Taiwan? Iâ(TM)m guessing a lot. And such places are considered to have at least 3x fighting power than any aircraft carrier.
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Here's the thing, Flyboy. We ALREADY have weapons more terrible than AI powered drones. We've had the ability to incinerate entire cities and turn entire countries into radioactive wastelands since the 1950s and 1960s.
The disinformation and job loss? Those will get the people willing to use those weapons elected. Think back to April 7 of this year, when Trump said an entire civilization will die. Several hours later, an E-4B Nightwatch (command aircraft) sortied out of Andrews AFB near DC. Note the sl
Burn, baby, burn! (Score:4, Insightful)
-950 points on the NASDAQ is a good start ... hopefully it's just getting started, and the fall will be 10x as hard after the techno-fascists' enablers are dragged our of office kicking and squealing -- election minus 4 days. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
The entire concept of "disrupt things that actually make people money, make people happy, enshittify them, corporatize them, and turn them into surveillance machines" needs to be razed to the ground.
Re: Burn, baby, burn! (Score:3)
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Because only boomers have investments.
Your whining is the same thing that has been said for centuries whenever a new technology or process has come along. I can guarantee you would have been one of those whining when the cotton gin was invented, or cars and airplanes started being made. This is how society advances. If you don't like, you don't have to participate.
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Nah. I'm 42. I can't retire for at least two decades. If the market crashes hard right now, I'm very confident it will come back like it always has before. If it doesn't come back, it means the government/society is dealing with way bigger issues then retirement planning.
In fact, since I have a large amount of liquid assets, I'm hoping for a crash that also burns the real estate market down again. I'd love to get back on the housing rung but I need a bubble pop first. Asset prices are way to high right now.
The economy crashing won't stop techno fascism (Score:2)
It's one of the things the left wing really doesn't like to think about. Like how the biggest gains in the civil Rights movement happened in the 60s and 70s which happened to coincide with a period of economic prosperity.
It really really pisses off
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No, the US is a cancer on the world that needs to be given some harsh chemotherapy. It's one of the most authoritarian countries in the world, yet Americans don't even have the self-awareness to realize how strictly they're being controlled. A diminished US economy with the oligarchs' fortunes diminished (or a system where they can't thrive as much) will reduce the ability of unelected forces to use their money to influence politics around the world, and spread the disease.
1960s and 70s, Civil Rights - su
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Subsisting people spend little time pondering pamphlets or worrying about ratios of atmospheric trace gasses.
No, but they can be manipulated by fear, usually fear of others, currently immigrants, the sexually different and Muslims. The populists are doing well in elections all over the place by manipulating that fear.
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Or not have a 401(k) and actually invest in productive stuff like building a small business, renovating housing, and holding/renting out for the long term (not just "flipping") etc.
While you can self invest, you would not get the tax advantage of the 401k or other tax deferred things. You would also not be able to receive any employer match contributions which is free money and it would be silly not to have a 401k if your company offers one. 401k plans generally don't let you pick specific securities, instead the 401k provider has a set of funds to choose from. While with effort you can route your money into non-tech based funds, it does require research. Most providers have generic t
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Eh, my 401k balance won't matter until I'm near retirement. At 42, I've got time for it to come back and it always has. If it doesn't, it means the broader economy and the government are having massively bigger problems.
I am also in an "essential" job, grocery store worker. People will need to eat regardless of what is happening. It's a fairly recession proof job.
If all that fall apart, we got bigger problems then spreadsheet numbers.
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Or not have a 401(k) and actually invest in productive stuff like building a small business, renovating housing, and holding/renting out for the long term (not just "flipping") etc.
Interesting in real estate, rental properties, small businesses, etc. are (1) extremely risky and (2) require large amounts of money. Stocks are risky but much less risky than starting a business or renting out homes.
What's the failure rate for small businesses? Rental properties face vacancies, bad tenants, and significant costs for taxes, management, and maintenance. Rental property yield are low unless one gets lucky and but undervalued properties.
Most important, a lot of people only have maybe a few ten
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How much do you think starting a small business costs?
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I have a little in stocks, the rest are in two rental properties paid out-right.
I bought a house initially (fixer-upper) in an area I knew would grow. Fixed it up, over paid the mortgage, for over a decade then sold it at a much greater profit (3 ti
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If you buy in some Podunk town in a red state, and you don't realize that your new tenant works for a business that regularly gives kickbacks to the local police, while their wife is sleeping with the civil court judge's son...
What does any of that have to do with that tenant paying their rent? That's literally all I care about so long as you aren't damaging the property or running an illegal business out of it.
Social issues have nothing to do with paying your rent. Providing housing is about making money, not some social justice theory.
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You can't just say, just ignore the entire system and live outside of it and be successful outside of the system you're born in. I mean you can but frankly that makes you an insuffera
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You should avoid Poland. They are actually conservative. Maybe France would be nice for you. You could join the "mostly peaceful protests" in burning down old cultural buildings and destroying businesses that provide jobs to people.
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Poland is economically pretty far left by US standards ... has a heavily subsidized national rail system (trains are awesome), NHS-type national insurance, free public school/university system, and a significant level of state ownership in "private" companies. Plus I speak the language fluently, so there's that.
All of the "Poland is based" Trumpists don't have a clue, and think that the ideas of a few troglodytes in bumblefuck (i.e. LGBT-free zones - which incidentally were struck down by even conservative
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I'll take your word on Poland as I only know what I see the news. What I've seen in the news is Poland is over the immigrant stuff and I forget the other thing that suggested a more conservative base compared to the average European baseline. That may be a better way to phrase that.
Incidentally, every right of center party in Europe is always defined as "The Far Right", which seems batshit crazy if you look at the America Right in comparison. It makes the European right look center.
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Id agree with you if it wasn't for so many having their retirements or livelihoods tied up in it. Not of their own choice.
If you've been heavily invested in a 401k for 40 years and are nearing retirement or already retired, a big short-term bounce doesn't really affect you all that much. You gained a lot of money on paper and then lost it all, leaving you back where you started. It's only younger people who likely have their 401k witholding maxed that really got hurt because they bought on the upswing and that investment is now gone.
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Hmm. As a middle age (42) person, I don't worry about my 401k crashing because it has decades to return and it always has. If it doesn't, that means the economy never recovered and likely the country is already dead. Then I'll have much bigger problems then a spreadsheet balance.
The worse thing you can do is sell after the crash. Just hold and stop staring at the account. It will come back. Time in the market over timing the market.
Of course, if I was trying to retire in the next year or so, I'd likely be s
Re: Burn, baby, burn! (Score:4, Insightful)
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You do realize that, outside the US, a lot fewer people own stocks; and that not all economies throughout the world follow the ouroboros model of continually building the next technology to enshittify society and make people's livelihoods precarious.
https://www.visualcapitalist.c... [visualcapitalist.com]
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Screwed indeed. There comes a point where things crash so badly, you won't have to worry about money... you'll have to worry about food.
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So far it's just a minor correction (Score:5, Insightful)
Please wake me up when it's over 20%.
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I had Intel and AMD shares for several years, Intel went over a year ago (before they shot up when Trump announced the US government was going to buy in), AMD around six weeks ago - close to the peak (got lucky!). I've been avoiding tech shares for a while now, this is my pension and I really don't want to lose it when the AI bubble bursts.
Intel have lost around 30% day-on-day as of right now, how much is this crash going to cost the taxpayer?
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That's because creating (or recycling) Agencies is "business as usual" for the federal government, as is sending troops abroad. The "troops abroad" part is supposed to be time-limited but we know how that went.
I know there were some howls of disgust when the gummint helped GM out - presumably from the GOP - but I thought those loans had been repaid. Are there precedents for the gummint buying into companies like that?
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Will do. Just after my broker executes all my sell stop orders at -19%.
Re-comment: Where will the money come from ? (Score:1)
Where will the money for AI come from ?
I don't mean the money investors are putting in, but the money that will fund the businesses they are hoping will return their investments.
Has anyone tried to calculate how much money companies and people will be spending on (frontier, not cheap, local) AI in the near future ?
And whether that will amount to the
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Fractional reserve banking.
The next AI Winter will be spectacular (Score:3)
And the LLM assholes fully deserve that. The rest of the AI field, not at all.
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The problem is not the jobs. It's the lack of resources that not having a job results in. The real fear isn't the technology but the weak social systems in the USA that will leave the jobless behind. If we alter out social systems a bit, the technology wouldn't be so scary because it would uplift everyone.
Sadly, humanity doesn't really work that way. It's ingrained into us to want to improve out lot. There is not enough resources in the world for all of us to live a rich western lifestyle.
You can feel free
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Robotics dweebs also deserve it, especially if their creations are used to (1) turf people out of jobs or (2) kill people - i.e. military purposes.
Meh. Firstly, I believe one of my creations is used to kill people, or as an important part of devices that do. But it's also used in a ton of other things. It makes as much sense to say steel is a bad creation because it's used to make guns.
Secondly, I'm not a pacifist. If someone's trying to kill me, I firmly believe in killing them first and I also do not thin
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The next AI Winter will be spectacular
One thing I am 100% confident in is that the that the AI winter following the oncoming crash will be every bit as bad as the internet winter following the dotcom crash.
Which is to say: not.
For a lot of things it works way too well and is way too effective to disappear. Sure we won't get frontier model inference for 1/5th of the cost. Some of the "growth at all costs" behemoths might crash as hard as webvan. But you know, online shopping and deliveries didn't die with th
Marketing idea (Score:2)
1 Trillion? (Score:2)
IANAE, but I'm pretty sure it's a *lot* more than 1 Trillion at this point...
AI is clearly profitable (Score:4, Interesting)
Organizations all over the world are profiting from AI. It's just not the organizations you'd like to have growing and making more money: Hackers and spies run by strategic enemies, scammers run by organized crime, the US President and his family, etc, etc..
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