Alphabet (GOOGL) is on track for its worst day ever. The stock fell about 12% Thursday after its third-quarter results, a bigger decline than any session since its 2004 IPO.
That puts nearly $500 billion in stock market value at stake, the second-largest one-day loss ever for a U.S.-listed company. Only Nvidia (NVDA) lost more, about $593 billion on January 27, 2025, the day Chinese company DeepSeek shook AI investors.
According to Yahoo Finance calculations, Alphabet would need to close at around $274.75, down around 15%, to break Nvidia’s record. It has already surpassed the $400 billion lost by SpaceX (SPCX) on June 22, the previous No. 2.
In dollar terms, this is by far Alphabet’s worst day. Its previous all-time worst was around $275 billion on July 23. The stock is also on track for the biggest post-earnings decline since the company’s IPO, according to Bespoke Investment Group. The previous low was a drop of almost 10% in July 2008.
The quarter gave both sides plenty to argue about. Google Cloud revenue more than doubled to around $31 billion, and the Gemini app surpassed 1 billion users. But search revenue rose 12% to about $63 billion, below Wall Street’s estimates of about $65 billion. Free cash flow — the money left after paying for things like data centers — saw a loss of about $9 billion as AI spending increased. The company’s stakes in AI laboratories are also costly.
“The bears will say this is the first quarter where AI is starting to seriously hurt their search business,” said Jeffrey Wlodarczak, CEO of Pivotal Research, in a recap of why investors hated this quarter.
CFRA’s Angelo Zino was more patient, telling Yahoo Finance that the pullback “probably represents a buying opportunity.”
Losses of this magnitude were previously unheard of.
U.S.-listed stocks have lost $200 billion or more in a single session 18 times this year through Wednesday. That’s up from 13 for all of 2025 and none before 2022, according to Yahoo Finance calculations using Bloomberg data. Alphabet alone has lost about $1.4 trillion since its record high in May.
Amazon (AMZN) reports after Thursday’s close, the last of the big three cloud providers to report this week. Faster growth at Amazon Web Services without impacting cash flow would indicate a problem specific to Google’s search business. Another quarter of cash burn would put the entire AI spending sector back on the defensive.
In-house AI tools helped analyze interview transcripts, research, and write this article. Humans reviewed, edited and fact-checked the material before publication.
Jared Blikre is the global markets and data editor for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on @SPYJared or email him at jaredblikre@yahooinc.com.
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