Intel‘s stock is heading for its worst single-day drop in two years, plunging around 14% on Thursday after the chipmaker disclosed a deadly factory explosion and issued a bleak forecast for its PC business, according to MarketWatch.
Intel (Credits: MarketWatch)
The selloff came after Intel revealed that an explosion at its Kiryat Gat, Israel factory — which killed two people and seriously injured one — will erase roughly $600 million in revenue over the next two quarters. If the decline holds, Intel would shed over $80 billion in market value in a single session.
Intel’s Israel Factory Explosion Cuts Revenue Outlook
Finance chief David Zinsner said the Kiryat Gat fab, which largely produces data center chips on the company’s 10 nanometer process, has been shut down for two weeks and is expected to resume ramping up production by the end of this week. The company is still determining which wafers are salvageable after the blast.
Intel expects the disruption to reduce its fourth-quarter revenue outlook by roughly $300 million and cut gross margins by about 200 basis points, with the full financial fallout still uncertain.
Weak PC Sales Add to the Pressure
The factory news landed alongside an already disappointing outlook for Intel’s PC business. Sales in the PC chip division fell 5% to $8.10 billion, missing analyst estimates of $8.98 billion, as soaring memory prices dented demand and corporate IT budgets tightened.
Zinsner expects PC revenue to decline in the mid-twenty percentage range in the fourth quarter and remain weak through the first half of next year. That’s a tough picture for a stock that had more than doubled this year on optimism about Intel’s turnaround.
The gloom spread across the sector: Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD, Micron, Qualcomm and Arm Holdings all fell between 1% and 6% in extended trading after Intel’s announcement, according to Reuters.
For a company whose comeback story in 2026 was built on its new 18A manufacturing process and a revived foundry business, Thursday’s plunge is a stark reminder of how quickly investor confidence can evaporate when bad news arrives on two fronts at once.
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Source: MarketWatch — read the full story there.
