Broadcom fell 4.33% to $330.06 at 2:21 p.m. Friday, down from Thursday’s close of 345.00, after Intel’s quarterly guidance knocked about 25% off the rival chipmaker and dragged the chip sector with it. That is an intraday price, not a closing one.
The session so far has run in a narrow band, between 330.48 and 329.00. Every tick has been below Thursday’s levels.
This is not the first bad day. On Thursday, October 29, Broadcom closed down 1.94%, trading between 346.15 and 338.80. Friday’s price is below even that low. Two days earlier the mood was very different, as we wrote in Broadcom seen as the biggest winner from Anthropic’s IPO, when the stock was trading considerably higher.
The context
Intel, Broadcom’s main competitor in data center chips, reported on the evening of October 29, 2026. The quarter itself was strong: adjusted earnings per share of $0.52 against $0.41 expected, and revenue of $16.5 billion, up 21% year over year.
The outlook was the problem. Intel guided to revenue of $15 billion to $16 billion for the current quarter against a market forecast of $17 billion, earnings per share of $0.25, and a gross margin falling to 38% from 43%.
The company points first at personal computers. It expects PC sales to drop 12% in 2026 and 10% in 2027, because memory chips are scarce and increasingly expensive. An incident at an Israeli plant will cost it a further $300 million or so in quarterly revenue.
Intel shed roughly 25% on the morning of October 30, 2026, and took the sector with it. According to figures reported on October 30 by several US financial outlets, Dell lost about 13%, AMD between 8% and 10%, and Nvidia around 3%. Broadcom opened down roughly 4%. The SOXX index, the basket of leading semiconductor stocks listed on Wall Street, gave up around 7%.
A second, broader question landed in the same hours: how much the technology giants are still willing to spend on artificial intelligence infrastructure. Amazon reported negative free cash flow of $42.4 billion over the past twelve months and fell about 6.6%. Alphabet spent $51.36 billion on capital expenditure during the quarter, less than the $55.09 billion analysts expected. Microsoft cut its annual investment guidance to $170 billion from $175 billion, citing delays in GPU supplies from third-party vendors.
Taken one by one, these are still enormous numbers. But after months in which AI spending seemed set to rise without limit, the market read them as a first sign of caution. Whoever sells chips and data center components to exactly these groups, as Broadcom does, pays first.
The Anthropic deal problem
Broadcom carries a weight of its own. On October 26, a $63 billion financing package came to light, arranged by the group with Bank of America, Blackstone, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. Through a special-purpose vehicle, it will let Anthropic lease computing hardware built on Broadcom’s XPU chips.
The detail that matters is elsewhere in the structure. Broadcom is committing to guarantee the future value of those chips if they end up worth less than expected. That is a potential liability which does not appear on the ordinary balance sheet, and it sits on top of a similar commitment made with OpenAI in early October.
The deal went down well when it was announced. In recent sessions, though, investors have grown more suspicious of arrangements in which a chipmaker effectively finances its own customers’ purchases of its products. Some analysts call them “circular” transactions. No source ties them directly to Friday’s decline, but they are part of the climate in which the stock is trading.
Interest rates sit in the background. The Federal Reserve left them unchanged at 3.75% to 4% on Wednesday, October 28, in a non-unanimous vote. Semiconductors actually helped Wall Street close slightly higher that day. The Fed has little to do with Friday’s move, except as the high-rate backdrop that makes every doubt about tech weigh a little more.
The technical picture
The stock is sitting below all the main moving averages. The 20-session average is at 347.15; the 50-, 100- and 200-day sit between 353.57 and 371.35. In mid-October the 50-session average crossed below the 200-session one, the so-called death cross, a crossover technical analysts usually read as a deterioration in the underlying trend.
Resistance for the day was indicated at 347.83 and 350.67, support at 340.48 and 335.97. The price is already below both support levels, which says a lot about the speed of the decline. Over recent months, 352.77 has pushed the stock back twice, while 342.81 and 335.81 have held.
The rest of the indicators are less clear-cut. The 14-session RSI is at 49.1, neutral, but it is diverging upward against the price, sometimes a signal that selling pressure is easing. MACD and the stochastic give no strong reading in either direction. The ADX at 23.2 describes a still-weak trend, even with sellers in charge.
The 20-session Bollinger Bands run from $315.95 to $378.36, and the price is in the lower half of the channel. The Fibonacci retracements calculated on the decline of the past six months, between $386.99 and $428.24, all sit far above. Getting back there would take a long recovery.
Underlying trend and volatility
The one-year balance is negative at -7.50%, and the one-month at -1.76%. The week before Friday ran the other way, up 6.73%. Over the past twelve months the stock has hit a high of $495.00 and a low of $289.96, leaving it roughly a third below the peak.
It also moves a lot. Over the past 20 sessions the price has swung an average of 2.63% a day. Annualized historical volatility is 43.01% over 20 sessions and 36.97% over 60. Wide day-to-day swings are the norm in this phase, not the exception.
What to watch now
The open question is whether the Intel effect stays a short-term rebalancing or pushes the market into a broader reassessment of what everything around artificial intelligence is worth. Two dates matter for Broadcom: fourth-quarter fiscal results, expected in December, and developments in the Anthropic deal, where investors are likely to demand more clarity on the off-balance-sheet exposure.
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Editor’s note
This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Ufficio Studi Money.it on October 30, 2026 as «Broadcom affonda in Borsa: pesa il crollo di Intel e tornano i dubbi sulla spesa per l’AI». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.
