Qualcomm stock slides amid data center pivot, Google, Meta, TikTok sue over California law, Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia - Big Tech Report

Qualcomm stock was dealt a blow, falling again on Thursday, after Thursday's challenging earnings.

As the dust settles, after Qualcomm used its fourth-quarter 2026 earnings call to lay out a push into AI data center chips, as smartphone sales fall roughly 20% compared with 2025.

The company pointed to partnerships with Amazon and Meta announced earlier this year, forecasting around $650 million in data center revenue in the first quarter of 2027, rising to $5 billion by the end of 2027 and $15 billion by 2029.

Qualcomm said it expects data centers to eventually make up about 30% of its business, against total company revenue of $10.4 billion in 2026. Shares fell 9.50% to $156.73.

The target is more modest than AMD's, which has said it expects over 80% of its revenue to eventually come from data centers, but underscores how broadly chipmakers are chasing AI infrastructure spending.

Google, Meta and TikTok have filed suit against California to block a state law regulating how social media platforms handle younger users, as reported by Reuters and Bloomberg.

The companies are challenging the measure in court rather than complying, setting up a legal fight over how far states can go in dictating platform design and content rules for minors.

The suit adds California to a growing list of jurisdictions where tech platforms are contesting youth-safety legislation rather than adjusting their products, a pattern that has played out in several other states. Meta shares fell 4.23% to $603.34 and Google shares fell 1.93% to $283.35 in regular trading.

Microsoft has turned down an option to more than double its data center lease with Nscale at the British AI infrastructure firm's Ward County, Texas site, the Financial Times reported, citing three people familiar with the matter. The deal would have been worth tens of billions of dollars. Nscale must now find other customers for the capacity or forgo billions in future revenue, as it prepares a roughly $35 billion initial public offering.

The decision follows Microsoft's withdrawal earlier this year from a $3 billion deal to lease capacity at Nscale's Essex site in the UK, and comes as Nscale's flagship West Virginia campus — central to its $45 billion computing agreement with Anthropic — faces construction delays and local opposition. Nscale posted a net loss of $1 billion on revenue of $141 million in the first half of 2026. The company says Microsoft's move will not affect its total backlog of $103 billion. Microsoft shares fell 3.13% to $538.40 in regular trading.

Nvidia fell 8.55% to $183.01 on Thursday, extending a slide that has erased nearly $1.4 trillion in market value since the chipmaker's record close on 6 October. The stock is now down roughly 25% from that peak and trading below its 200-day moving average, putting it on track for a fifth consecutive weekly decline — a streak it has matched or exceeded only 12 times since its 1999 IPO.

The selloff is broad: AMD, Micron and Arm have posted steep double-digit losses, Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor are down near 10%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index is more than a third below its June record. The proximate trigger is political rather than operational — Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress on campaigns that targeted the power demands of AI data centers, and a Senate bill that would have forced data centers to cover more of their electricity costs came close to passing this fall. "There will be congressional hearings," Stifel's Brian Gardner told Reuters ahead of the vote. "There will be investigations."

Apple has cut the daily budget its engineering teams can spend on AI tools, lowering the cap from $300 to $200 in October, Bloomberg reported. Further reductions are under consideration, with some engineering allowances potentially falling to $100 a day and a limit as low as $25 a day being weighed for staff outside engineering.

The move marks a reversal for a company that has pushed to embed AI across its engineering workflows, and comes as employers more broadly pull back from the push earlier this year to maximize staff token usage. Questions remain across the industry about the gap between the cost of running AI tools and the productivity gains they produce. Apple shares were down 1.79% at $343.26 in the regular session.