Alphabet heads for a $500 billion drop in market value, the biggest in its history

Alphabet ( GOOGL ) is on track for its worst day ever. The stock fell about 13% Thursday after its third quarter results , steeper than any session since it went public in 2004, including its drops in March 2020 and September 2008.

At its low, Alphabet had lost $524 billion in stock market value, the second-biggest one-day loss ever for a US-listed company. Only Nvidia ( NVDA ) has lost more, about $593 billion on Jan. 27, 2025, the day China's DeepSeek rattled AI investors.

Alphabet would need to close at about $274.75, down roughly 15%, to take Nvidia's record, by Yahoo Finance calculations. A close at $282.34 or lower would lock in a full $500 billion loss. It has already blown past the $400 billion SpaceX (SPCX) lost on June 22, the previous No. 2.

In dollars, it's Alphabet's worst day by far. Its previous worst was about $275 billion on July 23. It's also on track for the stock's steepest drop after an earnings report since the company went public, according to Bespoke Investment Group . The previous low was a slide of nearly 10% in July 2008.

The quarter gave both sides plenty to argue over. Google Cloud revenue more than doubled to about $31 billion, and the Gemini app passed 1 billion users. But search revenue grew 12% to about $63 billion, short of Wall Street's roughly $65 billion estimate. Free cash flow — the cash left after paying for things like data centers — swung to a loss of about $9 billion as AI spending climbed. The company's stakes in AI labs cost it too.

"The bears will argue this is the first quarter that AI is starting to seriously hurt their search business," Pivotal Research CEO Jeffrey Wlodarczak said in a rundown of why investors hated the quarter .

CFRA's Angelo Zino was more patient, telling Yahoo Finance the pullback "probably represents a buying opportunity."

US-listed stocks have shed $200 billion or more in a single session 18 times this year through Wednesday. That's up from 13 in all of 2025 and none before 2022, according to Yahoo Finance calculations from Bloomberg data. Alphabet alone has lost about $1.4 trillion since its record in May.

Amazon ( AMZN ) reports after Thursday's close, the last of the big three cloud providers to report this week. Faster growth at Amazon Web Services without a hit to cash flow would point to a problem specific to Google's search business. Another quarter of cash burn would put the whole AI spending trade back on the defensive.

Internal AI tools helped analyze interview transcripts, research, and draft this post. Humans reviewed, edited, and fact-checked this post before publication.

Jared Blikre is the global markets and data editor for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @SPYJared or email him at jaredblikre@yahooinc.com.