Alphabet Loses Roughly $500 Billion in Market Value After Earnings, Search Growth Slows

Alphabet, Google's parent company, lost roughly $500 billion in market value Thursday as its shares fell nearly 13% after its third-quarter earnings, its worst single day ever. Class A shares closed at $283.82, down 12.64%, erasing about $499.8 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal; other tallies put the loss at $482 billion. Revenue was $127.6 billion, up 25% but below Wall Street expectations. Search revenue rose 12% to about $63 billion, short of the roughly $65 billion expected and down from 17% growth a quarter earlier, while Google Cloud revenue more than doubled to about $31 billion. Alphabet spent about $51.4 billion on capital expenditures, mostly on AI data centers. Only Nvidia's $593 billion loss in January 2025 was larger.

Right-leaning Daily Mail and Fox Business lead with the scale of the loss. The Daily Mail headline cites $482 billion and fears the AI bubble will burst, compares the drop with 2008, 2020 and Nvidia's DeepSeek-era loss, and notes cloud strength. Fox Business uses the Journal's near-$500 billion figure, stressing AI spending, capital expenditures and slowing search growth, and features analyst Gary Kaltbaum. Left-leaning NBC News also frames the day as raising fears of a popping AI bubble, but its video report by Allie Canal links big tech spending to AI's effect on the job market, which the right-leaning pieces do not mention. All tie the sell-off to AI spending worries. Semafor stands apart by quoting an analyst on AI agents taking share from Search and YouTube and describing tougher terms on AI debt deals.