Amazon, Intel earnings jolt sinks Zeta Global 6.1%

The selloff follows a pattern of investor anxiety that began earlier in the week, when mediocre earnings from Alphabet and ServiceNow already had market participants on edge. The disappointing reports from Amazon and Intel then amplified those concerns, triggering a broad slide across technology equities and hardware suppliers, according to CNBC.

The underlying worry is capital expenditures — the funds poured into long-term assets such as data centers and computing hardware. With both Amazon and Intel spending heavily to build out artificial intelligence infrastructure, investors are questioning when these investments will translate into meaningful revenue and profit growth, CNBC reported. The steep drops in the two tech giants weighed heavily on market indices, showing how vulnerabilities among dominant leaders can rapidly dampen confidence across the broader industry.

Zeta Global's 6.1% decline comes against a backdrop of extreme volatility: the stock has had 50 moves greater than 5% over the last year. The previous big move was 10 days ago, when it gained 3.8% as software stocks extended gains amid a broader market overhaul regarding the future of the AI trade. That repricing followed a sharp retreat in tech equities the prior week, when mounting financing hurdles weakened demand for physical AI builders. CNBC noted that high-growth software stocks are looking increasingly attractive as market participants rotate money out of semiconductors and into parts of the AI trade they believe will outperform, driven by weariness over a ballooning U.S. fiscal deficit, higher inflation, and an anticipated deceleration in the massive AI infrastructure capital expenditure cycle.