Intel sinks about 25% before the open as PC slowdown hits its outlook

Update, Oct. 30: Intel shares were down about 25% in premarket trading Friday, deeper than Thursday's roughly 17% after-hours drop, helping pull Nasdaq futures down 2%, CNBC reported. Premarket prices can change once regular trading opens.

Where the weakness is: Sales in Intel’s PC chip group fell 5% from a year earlier to $8.1 billion and missed estimates, while data center and AI revenue jumped 78% to $7.3 billion, CNBC reported. "We see the PC slowdown continuing at least through the first half of next year," finance chief David Zinsner said in Intel’s release. Counterpoint Research found global PC shipments fell 4% in the second quarter as memory and other parts got more expensive, according to CNBC.

The Israel factor: An explosion earlier this month at Intel's chip factory in Israel killed two workers and seriously injured a third, CNBC reported. Zinsner told Reuters the plant has been shut for about two weeks and the incident will cost about $600 million in lost revenue over two quarters. He said production there should start ramping back up by the end of this week.

Ripple effects: After hours, AMD fell 4% and Broadcom 2%, and a leveraged chip-index fund dropped 9%, Reuters reported. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index had already slid 1.4% in Thursday's regular session after Alphabet's AI spending report, and it is down 13% from its recent October high.

The strongest case for Intel: Intel said revenue, gross margin and earnings per share all beat its own guidance, and called it its strongest data center growth in 15 years. Zinsner said on the call that Intel expects industry server CPU units to grow more than 30% in both 2026 and 2027 as AI agents lean on regular processors, and CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the company still sees "robust demand for CPUs" in the long term.

The strongest case against: The guidance gap is large, roughly $1.1 billion to $2.1 billion below what analysts expected, and the PC business is still Intel's biggest. One analyst quoted by Seeking Alpha called the outlook a major step back for the turnaround. Bokeh Capital's Kim Caughey Forrest told Reuters, "As Google learned today, earnings matter."

What’s still unknown: After-hours trading is thin and often exaggerates moves, Reuters noted, so Friday’s regular session will give the real verdict. Reported talks for SK Hynix to lease space at Intel’s Ohio site have not been confirmed by either company, CNBC said. AMD reports next week and Nvidia in mid-November, which will show whether Intel’s PC problem spreads.

Sourcing: Intel’s Q3 2026 release (revenue, EPS, Q4 guidance, Zinsner and Tan quotes, data center growth); CNBC (Katie Tarasov, Oct. 29) for LSEG estimates, segment revenue, Counterpoint PC data, Israel explosion casualties, the 10% government stake, YTD and October moves, the server CPU forecast and the unconfirmed SK Hynix report; CNBC after-hours movers for the ~17% drop; Reuters via StreetInsider (Sinéad Carew, Oct. 29) for the $600M Israel cost, chip-stock spillover and SOX figures; Seeking Alpha for the analyst ‘step back’ comment. Outlets put the after-hours drop between 16% and 20%; we use about 17%. Not investment advice.