$NOW Craters 17% While $INTC Moons 15% — AI Is Both the Villain and the Hero This Week
How one earnings week perfectly captured Wall Street's schizophrenic relationship with AI disruption
Ticker Ratings
| Ticker | Rating | Entry Price | Current | $ Gain | % Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| INTC INTEL CORP | buy | $82.43 | — | — | — |
$NOW dropped 17% — its worst single day on record — despite posting a quarter that technically cleared the Rule of 50. The crime? Cutting its full-year forecast and spooking investors who are already sweating whether AI eats seat-based SaaS alive. Even at 37x earnings post-crash, Cramer's on CNBC calling it expensive. Reddit's r/wallstreetbets was not kind. YouTube finance Twitter was not kind. Nobody was kind.
Meanwhile, $INTC went full cinderella story after hours — surging ~15% on a massive beat-and-raise. Adjusted EPS of 29 cents vs. the 1-cent street estimate. Revenue of $13.6B vs. $12.4B expected. Foundry revenue up 16% YoY. CEO Lip-Bu Tan is getting his flowers across Bloomberg Surveillance, Bloomberg Tech, Bloomberg Businessweek, and basically every Bloomberg podcast that exists — they covered it at least five times, which tells you everything. Xeon server CPUs are in demand as AI head nodes, and Intel is supply-constrained, which is the good kind of constrained.
The real punchline: both stocks moved on AI — one because AI might kill its business model, one because AI is printing its growth. Same theme, opposite trades. Welcome to 2025, where the vibe check is everything and nothing at the same time.