Nasdaq’s 2.68% Plunge Was AI’s One-Day Bill: Meta’s $825B Tab, Tesla’s Cutback, CoreWeave’s Debt

The Nasdaq Composite fell 712.85 points on Thursday, 2.68 percent, its worst day since early June. The equal-weight S&P 500 rose 0.23 percent in the same session. The gap says what the headlines didn’t: this was not a market selling off. It was a handful of the world’s largest companies paying, one by one, for the artificial intelligence buildout.

Meta‘s shares fell 7.5 percent on Thursday, and the damage came from a single line: free cash flow of minus $2.12 billion. Results beat on revenue, $64.6 billion against a $63.3 billion consensus, but the company spent $34.91 billion in capital expenditure against $32.79 billion in operating cash flow. It was the first negative reading in more than a decade, and roughly $148 billion of market value disappeared in a single session.

The Thursday filing was bigger still: $825 billion in future spending obligations, split between $355.7 billion in off-balance-sheet leases, mostly data centers and the energy to run them through 2036, and $454.5 billion in non-cancellable contracts as of September 30. In July the figure was $700 billion. To fund it, the board created a non-voting Class C share class, one for every existing share, effectively a two-for-one split that leaves Mark Zuckerberg’s 60.6 percent of the vote untouched. CFO Susan Li told analysts there were no financing plans to announce, calling the filing’s “hundreds of billions” language a theoretical maximum.

Tesla went the other way: it cut its 2026 capital spending forecast to about $20 billion from more than $25 billion, after third-quarter AI and robotics spending came in at $4.73 billion against $7.96 billion expected, which flipped its free cash flow positive by surprise. The shares fell 2.1 percent anyway. “For a stock priced on Cybercab and Optimus, that (capex forecast cut) explains why the shares went nowhere on a result that beat on most measures,” Josh Gilbert, lead analyst at eToro, told Reuters. Tesla and SpaceX have formed committees to explore a potential combination worth about $3.5 trillion. “The risk is Tesla now enters a period of limbo while investors await news on a potential combination with SpaceX, which … might face significant regulatory hurdles,” Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, told Reuters.

Further down the supply chain, Lam Research fell 11.9 percent after its December-quarter outlook disappointed. CFO Doug Bettinger said revenue guidance of $8.6 billion “would have been a bit higher if not for some near-term supply chain constraints.” Nvidia dropped 4.4 percent, about $243 billion of market value gone, hours after its chief executive, Jensen Huang, told CNBC the capital financing the AI boom was becoming “scarce,” with demand for neocloud capacity “off the charts” but capital shortages limiting growth. CoreWeave fell 10.1 percent, a company carrying about $50 billion in debt, that has never turned a profit and gets 67 percent of its revenue from Microsoft. Intel lost 8.3 percent. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 6.3 percent, its biggest daily drop since June 23.

Five of the eleven sector funds finished higher.

Consumer staples rose 2.47 percent, health care 1.45 percent, utilities 1.18 percent. Spotify gained 10.7 percent after forecasting fourth-quarter profit above estimates on its AI-powered features. The market liked that AI story. Procter & Gamble rose 6 percent. Blackstone advanced 6.6 percent after arguing that widening credit spreads on AI-related debt were an opportunity to lock in higher returns. Its president, Jon Gray, told CNBC that demand for AI was “parabolic,” according to CoinDesk.

Oil kept pressure on the other side of the tape. Brent closed at $111.61, up 2.56 percent, a five-month high, after Houthi strikes on Saudi targets. Gold fell 2.2 percent to $4,050.35. The 10-year Treasury yield settled at 5.03 percent. Bitcoin slid to around $81,800, roughly 3 percent lower.

Next week brings the next round of audits: Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon report. The Conference Board’s leading index was unchanged in September, and initial jobless claims sit near multi-decade lows, which leaves the Federal Reserve free to keep raising rates. Markets are pricing another 25 basis points before year-end.

Of the 111 S&P 500 companies that have reported third-quarter results so far, 83 percent have beaten analyst expectations, according to LSEG data.