It’s because computer sales are down because RAM is unavailable because AI companies bought it all on credit because the investors gave them shitloads of market cap because they want to replace PCs with LLMs because they have all these chips that can crunch numbers because semiconductor companies have been building them for LLMs.
Intel makes most of it’s money selling to data centers and renting out it’s manufacturing capabilities to companies, they do make a lot of money selling chips for computers still but that hasn’t seen a huge decline. This selloff is more due to concerns about the datacenter side of the business.
These sell offs are about projected future revenue, and what analysts think is likely. The sell of tells us those folks are worried about the future rate of datacenter construction not growing, and thus demand for chips to go in to them also not growing.
Oh sweet will there be more tech layoffs?
Lmao
Somebody call a WAAAAAH-mbulance!
Intel has been overly reliant on pc/laptop sales with vendors like dell, etc for their company history.
Wallstreet pretty stupid if they still don’t understand that there’s a tug of war between pc and data center. If ram, etc are being used up by data centers, pc components won’t be sold. A downturn in pc sales are a given for data center growth.
intel’s sales to datacenters and their foundry services (making other people’s chips) are larger than their sale of chips for PCs, has been for over a year now. Even a decade ago intel only made slightly more from PC sales than they did datacenters. They’ve been huge in the server world ever since Lin-tel systems devoured sun’s market share in the 2000s.
Not mentioned in the article but TSMC (company that actually manufactures the chips for everyone (except intel who manufacture their own designs)) has lost nearly 17% of it’s stock price over the past month, 7% in the last week.
All of these companies were being valued based on the assumption that the number of GPU data centers being built would increase as time went on. Essentially that the demand for the these various products would not just stay as high as it is, but keep getting higher.
This is just a bunch of analysts saying “ok, well, maybe the number of data centers being built will not increase drastically, and the demand for these products will stay the same”. The real blood bath comes if they start saying “there will be less datacenters constructed next year than there are currently under construction.”
The current shift in sentiment probably comes from the “disappointing” info from the companies that would be buying all the compute from the data-centers. Google missing ad revenue growth targets due to Gemini cannibalize search. Anthropic preparing to IPO and being forced to show less than stellar financials.
I suspect that this down turn is temporary and Valuations will rise angain and we will see another big crash before this hype cycle truly dies.
It was a down week, but not unheard of and markets are still up a solid amount going back a year. Retirement accounts are still ahead of 6 months ago most likely, so have some perspective. Prices were too high as it was so maybe more correction, but then funds are on sale each time paycheck buys some shares. Here’s one from three years ago but sounds like could be today, a fan of the blog and want others to do better too! mrmoneymustache.com/2023/09/04/interest-rates/ Also mrmoneymustache.com/2026/09/25/will-the-ai-bubble-destroy-our-retirement/
POP! Goes the bubble.
How can they be losing money when prices are higher than ever
New information has come to light that makes them believe that the growth they expected would occur in the future will be smaller than they previously thought. So they haven’t lost any money, except for the people who were betting on the potential future growth being higher.
Stocks are based on emotions rather than success or failure.
I’m talking about the prices of the product they are selling.
They don’t price their based on cost + profit. They price their product based on what analysts think the market will bear.
And for your original question: “How can they be losing money when prices are higher than ever”
They didn’t lose money. In Q3 of 2026 they beat earnings estimates by 27%, and missed revenue by 0.25%. The stonk dropped because its price was based on analysts’ guesses on what it would do in the future, and they’ve revised that estimate down based on Intel’s earnings report and what they think the AI market is going to look like. And so the stonk price collapsed all the way back to where it was in…April of this year.
The materials are also surely more expensive.
Intel has top of the line CPU products but I think they have bad management to be at loss making.
Woah do you think
I’m annoyed when a bloodbath on Wall Street is reported and 1.) the blood in question is metaphorical; 2.) it’s the retirement funds of average people that suffer because those who make a living gambling on these stocks have a lot more flexibility to dance around changing market conditions (and take tax write offs if they do manage to lose money).
- The bloodbath is a single-digit percentage, leaving no room for hyperbolic descriptors of textbook stock market corrections.
I guess we’re trying to make it so that, like the car industry, domestic companies only make super expensive products at high margins, and the only affordable products come from China, which we will tariff to oblivion, leaving the populace with no options.
We don’t have any domestic manufacturing left in almost all sectors, after they outsourced, the ones that didn’t follow went out of business, or had to chisel down their workers, their pollution controls, and their quality.
There aren’t US made options left for most stuff, even though we invented most of this stuff and it’s mass production. We handed east asia all of our tech, built their factories for them, on 99 year leases in china, that could be taken away at any moment, and enjoyed making profits on the backs of the exploited masses of Asians and other low cost countries.
Tariffs on these goods is a union issue, that the democrats betrayed the unions let the current president co-opt it to do an end run around the dems on the left, obviously he was always full of shit, but we all know the voters at large don’t know that.
You have just described the current state of the steel industry.
Lol, there’s practically no domestic steel production any more!
I think domestically is mostly just scrap steel at this point. They still may do some of the low grade takkanite ore or whatever that is left in the iron range, the largest iron deposit ever found, now cleaned out of the good stuff. All that World War gear and all.
Edit: The Iron range is in northern Minnesota, they shipped it over the great lakes, or down the old muddy, the mississippi that is, which they can reach the ohio and whatever and get it all to the smelters around ohio and Pennsylvania or whatever.
Oh there are still options…there are always options
When cheap ram, gpu, and ssd?
With AI getting to the point it can decompile and rewrite any software you will be lucky to be able to buy home components at all in the future. The wealthy want to take over compute and the only way to protect their code (AKA Imaginary Property) is to prevent you from having it in memory or stored locally.
Late 2028 maybe. But imo the floor has been permanetly raised, it won’t be as cheap even when it is cheap.
Contracts for 2029 are already being reduced due to the 2027 and 2028 long term supply agreements. It wouldn’t be long before 2029 is 40-50% committed
Imma disagree with al lot of the sentiments in this thread, cause I’m actually hopeful they will go back to pre ai pricing. But that’s because the economic crash is going to take a ton of people out of the middle class. Very few people with disposable income are buying, and the ones that could likely already have. No one is going to be paying for tokens, business won’t be able to sell their products they consume tokens to produce, contemporary data centers are already a cost sink and will only become more of a spread sheet liability, aws and Cisco might keep their current stock of hardware, but most of the venture capital is going to evaporate within a year. The government will bail out the big investors, but there has been so much speculative data center build out that will need to be liquidated.
iNfInItE gRoWtH
In q3 of 2028
It’s starting to pop?
There are already supply contracts all the way through 2027, ‘28, and most of ‘29. Even if it pops today, new supply wouldn’t start to become available until closer to 2029 at the earliest. And the price floor has permanently been raised, because the manufacturers have seen what consumers are willing to pay.
