Intel is under threat of the largest single-day drop in its shares in its history. Investors were alarmed by a weak sales forecast amid a cooling computer market and rising costs for AI development.

During trading on October 30, Intel shares lost about 30%. According to Reuters, such a drop threatened to reduce the company's market value by more than $146 billion. This is data during the session: at the time of publication of the agency, trading was still ongoing.

The reason was the forecast that Intel presented along with its quarterly report on October 29. The company expects revenue for the fourth quarter from 15 to 16 billion dollars - more than a billion below market expectations, Reuters notes.

The artificial intelligence boom has created a dual situation for the chipmaker. Demand for server processors is growing, but memory manufacturers are shifting capacity to high-performance components for AI systems. According to Reuters, this is pushing memory prices up and putting pressure on the regular computer market.

Intel Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner warned: the slowdown in the computer market, according to the company's estimate, will persist at least for the first half of 2027. For Intel, this is significant - the division, which includes the computer business, provided almost half of the quarterly revenue.

At the same time, the just-ended quarter brought sales growth. According to Intel's report, total revenue increased by 21% year-over-year, to 16.5 billion dollars. Revenue of the data center and AI division grew by 78%, to 7.3 billion dollars, and the client computing and physical AI division decreased by 5%, to 8.1 billion dollars.

At the same time, the company is incurring expenses for the development of its own manufacturing. The manufacturing division Intel Foundry ended the quarter with an operating loss of about 1.85 billion dollars. Intel management calls increasing shipments of Xeon server processors one of the nearest tasks.

The sell-off extended beyond Intel. According to Reuters, shares of AMD, Arm, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron lost from 4% to 12% during trading. Shares of server manufacturers Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Super Micro Computer also fell: investor concerns affected several links of the technology market at once.