Intel shares closed down about 29 percent on Friday, October 30, at 65.76 dollars, after a fourth quarter forecast far below Wall Street hopes buried a third quarter that beat on revenue, earnings and data center growth.
Intel lost about 29 percent of its value in one session on Friday, October 30. Shares closed at 65.76 dollars, down from 92.07 dollars on Thursday, in what market coverage counts as the worst day for the stock since July 1974.
The fall did not come from a bad quarter. It came from what Intel said comes next, and from how far the shares had already run before anyone heard it.
The Announcement
Intel reported its third quarter on Thursday after the close. Revenue rose 21 percent from a year earlier to 16.5 billion dollars, and adjusted earnings reached 52 cents a share, above the roughly 40 cents analysts expected in Reuters and CNBC coverage.
The data center business did the heavy lifting. Data Center and AI revenue jumped 78 percent to 7.3 billion dollars, which Intel chief financial officer David Zinsner called the strongest data center revenue growth in 15 years in the company release.
Intel third quarter revenue by segment, billions of dollars
Source: Intel third quarter 2026 release. Foundry includes intersegment sales and does not add to the total.
Then came the outlook. Intel guided fourth quarter revenue to 15 billion to 16 billion dollars, below the roughly 17.1 billion dollars analysts expected on LSEG data cited by Reuters. Adjusted earnings guidance was 25 cents a share against 43 cents expected, and adjusted gross margin was guided to 38.0 percent, down from 44.1 percent in the third quarter.
The PC Problem
The client group is still Intel at its largest, and it went backwards. Client Computing and Physical AI revenue fell 5 percent from a year earlier to 8.1 billion dollars, and fell 9 percent from the prior quarter in coverage of the call.
Zinsner put the warning in plain terms in the earnings release.
“We see the PC slowdown continuing at least through the first half of next year.”
Reporting on the call adds the scale behind that line. Intel expects PC shipments to drop about 12 percent in 2026 and another 10 percent in 2027, and it does not expect relief until memory supply and prices return to normal. TechSpot and other coverage link the squeeze to data centers buying up memory, which makes laptops and desktops pricier and cuts unit sales.
The forecast also carries a factory loss. An explosion at Intel Fab 28 in Kiryat Gat, Israel, in October killed two workers and seriously injured a third, CNBC reported. Intel said the shutdown costs about 300 million dollars of fourth quarter revenue, about 600 million dollars across two quarters, and about 200 basis points of fourth quarter gross margin.
Important Details
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Close on Friday, October 30 | 65.76 dollars, down about 28.6 percent |
| Prior close | 92.07 dollars on Thursday, October 29 |
| Historical comparison | Worst day since July 5, 1974, on Yahoo Finance closing data back to 1973 |
| Third quarter revenue | 16.5 billion dollars, up 21 percent |
| Third quarter adjusted earnings | 52 cents a share |
| Data Center and AI revenue | 7.3 billion dollars, up 78 percent |
| Client group revenue | 8.1 billion dollars, down 5 percent |
| Fourth quarter revenue guidance | 15 billion to 16 billion dollars |
| Analyst expectation for the fourth quarter | About 17.1 billion dollars, LSEG data via Reuters |
| Fourth quarter adjusted earnings guidance | 25 cents a share, against 43 cents expected |
| Downgrades on Friday | Bank of America, D.A. Davidson, Seaport and Roth, all to neutral in TechSpot coverage |
| United States government stake | About 10 percent, with a paper loss of about 12 billion dollars in Bloomberg estimates cited in coverage |
The selloff did not stay inside Intel. Reuters coverage reported falls of between 4 percent and 12 percent across Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD, Arm, Qualcomm and Micron on the day. Bank of America cut Intel to neutral and lowered its price target to 100 dollars from 145 dollars.
Context matters on the size of the drop. The shares had risen about 150 percent this year before the report, in CNBC reporting, and had nearly quadrupled between January and a record high in late June in TechSpot reporting. A stock priced for a clean comeback has further to fall when the comeback gets a date pushed back.
What’s Next
Confirmed steps are thin, and that is part of the story. Intel says its immediate priority is to unlock more supply for its Xeon server family, where demand is strong and supply is short. The Kiryat Gat plant was shut for about two weeks, and Intel expected production to restart around the end of the earnings week, in reporting on the call.
Open questions carry the risk. How long memory prices stay high, how deep the PC shipment falls run in 2026 and 2027, and whether data center growth can keep outrunning the client decline are all unanswered. Those are company forecasts and market reports, not settled outcomes, and the next quarter will test them.
For PC buyers, the near term read is blunt. Nothing in this report points to cheaper machines soon, because the shortage driving prices up is the same AI demand Intel is counting on in its server business.
Sources
- Intel: Intel Reports Third-Quarter 2026 Financial Results
- TechSpot: Intel stock plunges nearly 30%, its worst day in 52 years
- The Motley Fool: Why Intel Stock Crashed on Friday
- Body image: Dirty Static house style illustration
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