PC chip plunge wipes out a quarter of Intel’s value

What happened

According to the report published Friday 30 Oct 2026, Intel's share price plunged on Thursday after the company announced its Q3 results: shares started the day at $92.96 apiece, sank to $73 immediately after the results were announced, and reached $70.87 in after-hours trading at the time of writing, a 23.7 percent slump. The Q3 results included a 21 percent year-on-year revenue jump to $16.5 billion, at the high end of Intel's revenue guidance of $15.8-16.8 billion, helped by 78 percent growth for datacenter and AI products, and gross margins of 43 percent, which beat Intel's predictions by two points; however, revenue for client computing and physical AI products reached $8.1 billion, falling five percent year-over-year and declining nine percent from last quarter. In prepared remarks, CEO Lip Bu Tan said that in recent weeks customers began signaling a PC slowdown based on memory prices and availability, that the pace of the PC correction has accelerated over the last two months as OEM partners aggressively manage inventory to match softer sell-through, and he predicted the market for PC chips will shrink by 12 percent next year and remain tough until memory availability and prices begin to normalize. CFO Dave Zinsner declined on the earnings call to offer guidance on whether Intel can meet server CPU demand early in Intel's next financial year, saying Intel will likely not fully meet what customers require and that the situation will be more challenging in the first half of the year than in the second half. Tan also predicted, as a forecast rather than an achieved result, that server CPU TAM, largely driven by agentic workloads, could increase as much as 5X over five years, from $40B to more than $200B. The report also notes that SK Hynix this week predicted memory shortages will persist until the year 2030 (a prediction by SK Hynix, not an Intel statement).

Impact and signal

Affected components and suppliers

Source and time

Source: The Register · 10/29/2026 · View original source