Intel falls 9% as $3.7T chip rout spreads; Nvidia down 16% since Oct. 6 but holding up
- Chip and memory stocks have lost about $3.7 trillion in market value since Oct. 6, with Nvidia losing the most in dollars (about $896 billion) while Intel fell nearly 47% (about $279 billion), the steepest drop among the giants.
- Intel slid about 9% Monday after its worst day since 1974 on Oct. 30, when a disappointing forecast knocked nearly 29% off the stock, leaving it worth less than half its Sept. 30 value.
- Chip stocks shed more than $400 billion in a single session Monday even though about 7 in 10 S&P 500 stocks rose that day.
- Memory and storage names that led this year's chip boom (Micron, Sandisk, Seagate, Western Digital) fell roughly 6% to 8%, and Marvell dropped harder as it agreed to buy Lumentum in a $115 billion deal.
- Adam Johnson of the American Ingenuity Fund says the sell-off already priced in the worst (the market kitchen-sinked it), while John Chambers expects the gap between winners and losers to widen and says he would not bet against Nvidia.
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The big question for me is why Nvidia isn't falling nearly as fast as Intel. Nvidia's GPUs are the most in demand chip for AI, so I'd think it'd get hit just as hard.
The markets Intel sells into have way more freedom of choice for consumers. Also there's a kind of no one ever got fired for using Nvidia for inference thing going on.
A better comparison is AMD since they also make server CPUs. And I figure Intel holders are really betting on the fab business, which is still to play out.
Nvidia did $96B in revenue and $60B of profit in Q2 2026, both more than doubled from a year earlier, at 75% gross margins. Intel did $16.5B revenue and $3.3B profit in Q3 2026, and $13.7B and $4.4B a year before. They aren't in the same business.
Intel's GPUs are basically worthless for inference, forget training. From dollars per watt to sanity per unit of effort, there's no reason to buy anything but Nvidia right now, and I don't like that.
I'm used to stock collapse headlines meaning a 2% daily wiggle. This is down 50% in a month, but also up 50% on the year. Trading companies that are foundational to the world economy like meme stocks sure is something.
It's not really a meme stock. It's dropping because earnings came in below expectations.
I'm still bullish at this price. The terafab with Elon is already under construction, and 14A is the most powerful chip once they get it right.
People forget it was $17 a share in Nov 2024 and $36 in Nov 2025, so $67.50 today is still a huge two year return.
It's still at a forward P/E of 31, on par with AMD's 32 and way above Nvidia's 13.
There's a reason for that. P/E is basically 1 over cost of capital minus growth, so any growth above your discount rate sends the value to infinity and the multiple with it. Nothing with 30% growth for long is easy to value.
They should unlist it and let it come back once it can turn a profit for two quarters straight.
The genesis of all this is Apple moving off Intel to its own chips.
That's one small event, and it came years after Intel had already been slipping. The real start was Skylake, followed by fabs that missed generation after generation and a pile of acquisitions bought only to shut the products down.
Guess Trump has to stop bragging about the government buying Intel stock now.
Intel is like Boeing, it cannot be allowed to fail. If you think it can, go find a bunker. Advanced chip manufacturing is brutally hard and the finance people are clueless again.
The stock can fail and did, it went under 20. The government won't let the company die, but that says nothing about whether shareholders make money. Plenty of national interest companies got nationalized in a way that wiped out the common stock.
Intel will absolutely get designs on those fabs in 5, 10, 20 years because it's in the national interest. Keeping the share price above zero is not.