[EARNINGS ANALYSIS] Tech continues to get slammed as AI fears mount on dismal reports

• Recent tech earnings have underwhelmed, starting with a disappointing Alphabet report on Wednesday, who closed Thursday down 12.9%, and are extending on losses in pre-market trade on Friday, after it missed on profit and revenue, with worsening negative FCF. Given this, the Communication Services saw losses of 6.6% on Thursday.
• While Microsoft's earnings were solid [afterhours on Wed], they succumbed to the broader tech pressure, and also hit neo-cloud names CoreWeave (CRWV), Nebius (NBIS), and IREN (IREN) as the Co.'s lower-than-expected capex points to infrastructure partners taking longer to deliver capacity. The aforementioned names continue to move lower in pre-market trade on Friday, with the neocloud ETF NCLD down 5.5% on Thursday, and falling a further 7% pre-market today, so far.
• After-hours on Thursday the poor results continued and have hit US equity futures with the NQ currently lower by c. 2.6%, and continuing to raise AI concerns, as opposed to easing them. Overnight, Korea's KOSPI fell by 3.5%.
• Amazon (AMZN) (-7.5%) is falling after a rare top and bottom line miss, accompanied by underwhelming next quarter guidance, while Intel (INTC) (-25%) issued a dismal report; the name missed on revenue with FCF light, a poor next quarter view, driven by prolonged PC market weakness & memory shortages. In commentary, INTC expects the PC market slowdown to persist through at least H1 2027 amid memory shortages. Given this, other PC names such as DELL and HPQ are tumbling.
• On to memory, Sandisk (SNDK) (-9.5%) continues the free-fall following earnings as weaker-than-expected operating cash flow and investor concerns over the sustainability of AI spending outweighed solid earnings, guidance & stock split. As a result, the memory ETF DRAM is down c. 7% in pre-market trade.
• As such, attention turns to the open to see if the sell-off continues or there is a bit of rebound with participants buying the dip.

Broad sell-offs on clustered mega-cap reports follow a familiar sequence: one high-profile miss sets the tape, and subsequent prints in the same complex are punished for failing to dispel it rather than judged on their own numbers, as Microsoft's solid quarter selling off alongside Alphabet illustrates. The distinct channel here is capex guidance rather than earnings themselves: when hyperscalers trim or delay infrastructure spend, the transmission runs through the neo-cloud and GPU-leasing names, then memory and storage suppliers, which is precisely the pattern visible in the CRWV, NBIS, IREN and SNDK moves. Memory shortages cited as a cause of PC weakness are an unusual inversion of the historical cycle, where oversupply, not scarcity, has been the sector's recurring problem, and the read-across to DELL and HPQ reflects past episodes where one OEM's demand commentary re-rates the whole hardware peer set. Episodes of synchronized disappointment across the AI complex have tended to be resolved by whether the next round of capex commentary confirms retrenchment or reveals a timing issue, and by price action at the open, where concentrated pre-market selling in index futures of this size has historically either attracted dip buyers early or set the tone for a multi-session de-grossing.