AI Markets: capex spooks Wall Street, chips hold firm

Wall Street has run the numbers on the artificial intelligence bill: $797 billion wiped out in a single session at the tech giants, with oil above $100 thrown in for good measure. Meanwhile, the chip supply chain keeps racking up orders, with Intel back on track and Oracle set to equip the Pentagon.

Wall Street settles up on the AI capex bill

It took just one session to remind markets that artificial intelligence costs a lot before it pays off: on Thursday, July 23, the Nasdaq had its worst day since the “tariff tantrum” of April 2025, and investors now want proof that this colossal spending will generate revenue to match.

Key points:

  • The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.43% (25,065 points), the S&P 500 1.45% and the Dow Jones 0.97%; the VIX volatility index jumped more than 16%.
  • The “Magnificent Seven” lost a combined $797 billion in market value in a single session, their worst day since April 2025 (Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance).
  • The direct trigger: the previous day’s earnings. Alphabet raised its 2026 capital spending budget to as much as $205 billion, and at Tesla, whose profitability disappointed, Elon Musk announced that 2026 would be “a year of massive capex.”
  • Brent crude topped $100 a barrel (+7% on the session) after Houthi-claimed attacks on Saudi tankers, adding macroeconomic pressure on top of the doubts about AI.

Doubts that reach far beyond the hyperscalers

Tesla lost nearly 15% on the session, erasing more than $140 billion in market value, while Alphabet fell 5% to 6%. The move didn’t stop at the two companies in question: the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index also slipped, even though chips are billed as the big winners of AI spending. That’s the heart of the doubt now settling in: Alphabet, Tesla, Amazon (-4.6% in the fallout, ahead of its July 30 earnings) and the rest are promising hundreds of billions of dollars in data centers, but revenue from generative AI is still struggling to keep pace. It’s exactly the “super-cycle vs. bubble” debate already playing out around Oracle and TSMC, now spreading to the whole sector. The one notable exception: Apple, which has stayed out of the AI capex race, is up 11% this month and 18% since January.

What it means for a European investor

The jitters also hit vehicles available in a PEA: the Amundi PEA Nasdaq-100 (PUST) and the Amundi STOXX Europe 600 Technology (TNO) mechanically absorb the drop in the US heavyweights they track. For more targeted exposure to chipmakers and equipment makers, the Paris-listed Amundi MSCI Semiconductors UCITS ETF (CHIP) remains the most direct way in through a PEA. Above all, this session shows a shift in how the market reads the story: after two years in which every capex announcement pumped up share prices, investors now separate companies whose investments are already paying off (Alphabet’s cloud grew 82% last quarter) from those whose bet remains, for now, an act of faith.

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Chips: Intel stages a strong comeback, Nvidia beefs up its assembly chain

Despite the prevailing nervousness over capex, the AI chip supply chain delivered two pieces of good news Thursday evening: Intel posted its strongest quarterly growth in more than a decade, and Nvidia locked in more US assembly capacity with Amkor.

Key points:

  • Intel: quarterly revenue of $16.1 billion (+25% year over year), driven by a 59% jump in its data center/AI business to $6.3 billion; adjusted earnings per share of $0.42, double the consensus.
  • The company raised its 2026 capital spending budget to more than $20 billion (up from $18 billion previously) and pointed to another increase in 2027, with most of it going to tooling up its US fabs.
  • Nvidia signed a multiyear $1.5 billion deal with Amkor to expand US advanced chip assembly and test capacity, notably in Arizona; Amkor shares jumped more than 12% after hours.
  • Equipment makers Applied Materials, KLA and Lam Research rose after hours in the wake of Intel’s capex increase.

Intel finally changes course

After a very rough 2025, Intel posted its strongest revenue growth in more than ten years, driven by AI-related demand for server chips: management says that “data center capacity is no longer keeping up with orders,” a demand problem rather than a supply problem, which is fairly reassuring for what comes next. The foundry division (Intel Foundry), which also manufactures for outside customers, grew revenue 31% to $5.8 billion, an important signal for the company’s diversification strategy, which is betting on its 18A node (already in volume production since mid-July with ASML’s High-NA lithography). The stock climbed more than 11% after hours. The higher capital spending budget immediately lifted the sector’s equipment makers, proof that spending on production capacity is still, for now, well received when it comes with concrete orders.

Nvidia secures its assembly chain rather than its production

The Amkor deal covers the critical step of advanced assembly and packaging, the technique that combines several chips (compute, memory) in a single package, a bottleneck flagged for several quarters in the production chain for AI accelerators. Amkor had already struck a ten-year partnership with TSMC in June for the same reasons. For a European investor, direct access to Intel, Amkor or the US equipment makers goes through a standard brokerage account; ASML, for its part, remains PEA-eligible via Euronext Amsterdam, and a UCITS sector ETF (semiconductors) lets you capture the entire chain without picking individual stocks.

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SpaceX: Alphabet reveals a $94 billion stake, Starship 13 delayed again

For the first time since the June IPO, Alphabet has put a precise figure on the value of its SpaceX stake: $94.1 billion, almost all of it still locked up. Meanwhile, the Starship test flight remains at the mercy of the weather.

Key points:

  • In its quarterly report, Alphabet valued its SpaceX stake at $94.1 billion as of June 30, its first mark-to-market since the June 12 IPO.
  • Of that total, about $80 billion is subject to the standard post-IPO lockup, and another $14.1 billion to a longer lockup running until the third quarter of 2027; the unlocking is set to begin after SpaceX’s first earnings report, expected August 4.
  • Google (along with Fidelity) invested about $1 billion in SpaceX in January 2015; its stake, diluted over successive funding rounds, now represents about 4.9% of the company, down from nearly 6% before the recent dilutions.
  • Starship’s thirteenth test flight, already aborted on July 16 and then pushed back once, was scrubbed again Thursday because of Tropical Storm Bertha; SpaceX is now targeting Friday, July 24, with a launch window opening at 6:45 p.m. (New York time).

A paper gain, not a check you can cash

The $94.1 billion figure neatly illustrates the mechanics specific to pre-IPO investors: Alphabet is showing a spectacular gain on an initial investment a hundred times smaller, but it can’t sell a single share today. The disclosure coincided with the massive tech sell-off (see above), though analysts have not established a direct cause-and-effect link: Alphabet’s drop that day is attributed first to fears about its own capital spending budget. The calendar is still worth watching, though: the first restrictions start to ease after the August 4 earnings, a date already seen as SpaceX’s real test as a public company.

Still no way in for a European investor

Whether through SpaceX (SPCX, listed on the Nasdaq) or through Alphabet itself, neither stock is PEA-eligible: both are US shares, available only through a standard brokerage account for an individual French investor. For SpaceX, most of the float remains locked up anyway, including at longtime shareholder Alphabet, which mechanically limits trading until the various lockup waves expire.

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Oracle lands a Pentagon contract worth up to $7 billion

While Oracle is dragging around growing debt and a downgraded credit rating to fund its AI data centers, the company has just signed a major government contract that offsets, at least symbolically, the narrative of financial fragility.

Key points:

  • The US Department of Defense awarded Oracle a ten-year contract (a five-year base with a five-year option) worth up to nearly $7 billion.
  • It covers software licenses (perpetual and subscription), maintenance and consulting for the entire Pentagon, the Coast Guard and the intelligence community; the CIA was its first customer.
  • The contract consolidates many scattered licenses into a single agreement; the Pentagon’s chief information officer, Kirsten Davies, cites savings of at least $441 million for taxpayers.
  • Oracle shares gained more than 3% after hours on the news, to about $122.64.

A counter-narrative to the debt debate

The contract comes at just the right time for Oracle, whose credit rating was cut by S&P in July and whose Wisconsin regulator is already requiring additional financial guarantees on one of its OpenAI-linked data centers. The company also keeps borrowing heavily to fund construction of its AI data centers, while its traditional software revenue is slipping slightly. The Pentagon contract doesn’t change that underlying equation (it’s only a fraction of Oracle’s giant order backlog, with RPO of $638 billion), but it illustrates the company’s strategy: cement its position as an indispensable supplier to the US public sector while investing massively in AI cloud, where growth remains strong (+47% last quarter, according to available data).

Access for a European investor

Oracle remains a US stock, not PEA-eligible, available only through a standard brokerage account or via a physically replicated US tech ETF. Thursday’s move (+3%) is modest compared with the company’s broader financial stakes (tens of billions of dollars in additional debt to raise), a reminder that this kind of commercial announcement, however large in absolute terms, isn’t enough on its own to settle the debate over the model’s sustainability.

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Edition prepared by our monitoring agent (data and sources as of Friday, July 24, 2026), reviewed in line with our editorial policy. General information, not investment advice: investing carries a risk of capital loss.