How Stock Wipeouts for Alphabet and Intel Compare With the Top One-Day Losses -- WSJ

By Ed Ballard

Intel stock tumbled 29% this morning due to a slumping PC market, putting the company on course to see more than $140 billion of market value erased. It's an astounding loss-but not nearly big enough to make the all-time list of mega market-cap wipeouts.

It's a different story for Alphabet, which shed nearly $500 billion in market value yesterday as investors confronted the reality that AI is threatening the company's core search business. That was the second-worst day on record for a U.S. company, as measured by evaporated market value.

The list is dominated by recent moments when the AI trade blew a gasket. The worst day ever? That was Nvidia, back in January last year, when investors freaked out about Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek and its low-cost models. Concerns about low-cost competitors to the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI remain one of the clouds hanging over the AI investment boom.

If Intel closes at its current levels, it wouldn't even sneak into the top-100 all time losses. America has a lot of valuable companies, and sooner or later everybody has a bad day.

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October 30, 2026 10:15 ET (14:15 GMT)