Alphabet (GOOGL) had its worst day ever on Thursday. The stock fell nearly 13% after its third quarter results, steeper than any session since it went public in 2004, including its drops of more than 10% in March 2020 and September 2008.
Alphabet lost $475 billion in stock market value, the second-biggest one-day loss ever for a US-listed company, by Yahoo Finance calculations. Only Nvidia (NVDA) has lost more, about $593 billion on Jan. 27, 2025, the day China's DeepSeek rattled AI investors.
That blew past the $400 billion SpaceX (SPCX) lost on June 22, the previous No. 2.
In dollars, it was Alphabet's worst day by far. Its previous worst was about $275 billion on July 23. It was also the stock's steepest drop after an earnings report since the company went public, according to Bespoke Investment Group. The previous low was a slide of nearly 10% in July 2008.
The quarter gave both sides plenty to argue over. Google Cloud revenue more than doubled to about $31 billion, and the Gemini app passed 1 billion users. But search revenue grew 12% to about $63 billion, short of Wall Street's roughly $65 billion estimate. Free cash flow — the cash left after paying for things like data centers — swung to a loss of about $9 billion as AI spending climbed. The company's stakes in AI labs cost it too.
"The bears will argue this is the first quarter that AI is starting to seriously hurt their search business," Pivotal Research CEO Jeffrey Wlodarczak said in a rundown of why investors hated the quarter.
CFRA's Angelo Zino was more patient, telling Yahoo Finance the pullback "probably represents a buying opportunity."
Losses this size used to be unheard of.
US-listed stocks have shed $200 billion or more in a single session 18 times this year through Wednesday. That's up from 13 in all of 2025 and none before 2022, according to Yahoo Finance calculations from Bloomberg data. Alphabet alone has lost about $1.4 trillion since its record in May.
Amazon (AMZN), the last of the big three cloud providers to report this week, posted faster growth and a record cash burn after Thursday's close. Amazon Web Services grew 39%, its fastest in nearly five years, while its 12-month free cash flow sank to a record outflow of more than $42 billion. Its stock fell after hours, a sign the pressure on AI spenders reaches well beyond Google.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated Alphabet's one-day loss in market value on Oct. 29. It was $475 billion. We regret the error.
Internal AI tools helped analyze interview transcripts, research, and draft this post. Humans reviewed, edited, and fact-checked this post before publication.
Jared Blikre is the global markets and data editor for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @SPYJared or email him at jaredblikre@yahooinc.com.
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