💸Big Tech Burns $740B on AI as Nasdaq Drops 2.9% in a Day

Your cloud costs and AI stocks are both about to wobble

Investors finally blinked. The Nasdaq fell 2.9% and chip stocks got hammered, with Nvidia down 4%, Broadcom off more than 5%, and Qualcomm down 11%. Alphabet alone wiped out $500 billion in market value. The same spending that investors cheered earlier in the AI boom is now the thing they fear. If you build on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, this matters more than the stock chart. Demand for AI compute is still strong, and cloud growth is real: AWS grew 39%. But when the companies selling you compute are burning cash to build it, expect pricing pressure, tighter budgets, and pressure to show ROI on every GPU hour your team runs. The numbers are rough. Alphabet posted negative free cash flow of $9.1B in Q3 with quarterly capex at $51.4B, and it expects up to $205B this year. Amazon shows negative $42.4B in trailing free cash flow against $220B planned capex. Meta's Q3 free cash flow was negative $2.1B. Microsoft is the outlier at $18.6B positive, on $45.2B of capex. The gap is being filled with stock and bond sales, with $326B in debt raised by five companies in 2026.