Broadcom, down 13% on Thursday, shed $280 billion in one of the biggest single-day drops in Wall Street history.

What did the chipmaker do to earn this dubious distinction? It reported record quarterly revenue and operating profit, besting analyst expectations in the process, and projected better-than-expected revenue of $29.4 billion this quarter. The ensuing selloff highlighted the increasingly bullish expectations of AI investors, for whom good may not always be good enough.

Playing Against Perfect

The past few weeks have seen investors pour into firms selling artificial intelligence infrastructure, creating one of the year’s most robust rallies. The Philadelphia Semiconductor index, which tracks 30 of the world’s top US-listed chip manufacturers, has gained nearly 29% in the past month and 90% in 2026, reflecting trillions in added market value.

What propelled the recent wave of excitement was ever-higher AI capital spending forecasts: Goldman Sachs now predicts the hyperscalers will collectively allocate $725 billion to capex this year and $4.5 trillion from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2030. That’s a massive increase from late last year, when the bank forecast $500 million in AI hyperscaler capex in 2026.

It all left Broadcom, which has rapidly gained ground in the chip race, open to scrutiny for even the slightest concern. For the fiscal second quarter, the company reported a record $22.2 billion in revenue, a 48% year-over-year increase; within that, semiconductor revenue from AI grew an explosive 143% to $10.8 billion. But then come the nitpicks:

• Broadcom expects AI-related chip revenue to climb only 200% to $16 billion in the current quarter, short of Wall Street’s most bullish forecasts. And executives reiterated their expectations for only $100 billion-plus in AI chip revenue in 2027, leading TD Cowen to note that standing pat “in a market environment clamoring for material beats and raises is likely to disappoint.”
• “Broadcom delivered another eye-catching update, but this was a classic case of very high expectations meeting a market that wanted perfection,” Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Matt Britzman wrote. “Investors are punishing anything that falls short of exactly what they wanted to hear.”

Some analysts imply there’s an opportunity to buy the dip. TD Cowen reiterated its buy rating and $500 price target on Broadcom while BNP Paribas Exane raised its price target to $640, both suggesting considerable upside from Thursday’s $418.91 close.

Synchronized Diving: It didn’t help that Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said on an earnings call that Google, a major custom-chip client, will likely diversify its supply chain while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. CEO C.C. Wei warned shareholders that it will be years before global chip supply catches up with demand. In addition to Broadcom, rivals including AMD (down 3.5%), Micron (-7.7%) and Arm (-4.5%) likewise took a dive.

America’s fear of nuclear energy might be a mile wide and an inch deep. Or, in this instance, three miles wide. Regardless, just about every stakeholder is hoping to conquer their fears, and fast.

This week, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved Constellation Energy’s request to fast-track its revival of the Three Mile Island nuclear power ‌plant in Pennsylvania. The plan is to bring the once-doomed power plant back online sometime next year to service a nearby glut of power-hungry Microsoft data centers. For the hyperscaler and its area neighbors, energy relief can’t come soon enough.

Star Power

Microsoft struck a deal with Constellation in 2024, committing to a 20-year contract to buy all the electricity produced by the 835-megawatt reactor at the Crane Clean Energy Center on Three Mile Island (that is, the reactor that didn’t melt down 47 years ago). For reference, nearby Pittsburgh requires about half that much energy. Microsoft needs the power not only for its data centers in the state but also those in Chicago, Ohio and especially northern Virginia, where it has a major presence in so-called Data Center Alley.

The waiver Constellation received from FERC could significantly accelerate the timeline for Crane’s revival; previous projections didn’t see the plant coming online until 2031. In the meantime, electricity costs continue to rise:

• In Virginia, home to over 600 data centers, residential electricity bills surged nearly 15% year-over-year as of March, according to the US Energy Information Administration; in neighboring Maryland, residential costs rose an astounding 89%.
• In Pennsylvania, the Public Utilities Commission recently warned residents to expect higher electricity costs starting this month, due partly to surging data center demand; bills may rise 10% or more.

A bipartisan group of Pennsylvania lawmakers is pushing legislation to protect residents from data center-related price hikes, mirroring proposed federal legislation and the White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, already signed by many hyperscalers.

Fuse it or Lose it: Elsewhere in the realm of nuclear power, startup Thea Energy raised $100 million in Series B funding this week as it works to build commercial-scale fusion reactors. The science of nuclear fusion (as opposed to the fission process at Three Mile Island and elsewhere) remains highly complex, though Thea Energy co-founder and CEO Brian Berzin told The Daily Upside in February that it will be “delivering electrons reliably to end customers within a decade.” That $100 million certainly helps.

Bitcoin may be having a worse week than Euphoria fans who wanted a Season 4 with more glitter makeup. The cryptocurrency plunged to its lowest level since February, briefly bottoming out below $62,000 Thursday.

The weak week kicked off Monday when Michael Saylor, a bitcoin maximalist known for saying he’d never sell, sold a small part of his massive stockpile for the first time since 2022. Saylor’s bitcoin-holding company, Strategy, parted with 32 bitcoin for about $2.5 million, a few grains of sand off its mountain of more than 800,000 bitcoin worth tens of billions of dollars.

But that little bit of sand seemed to get in investors’ eyes.

Tech Stocks Break Up with Bitcoin

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 both notched records this week, challenging the narrative that tech stocks and crypto are tightly tied. The reason could be simple: When it comes to speculative trading, crypto simply has less hype around it right now. Investors may be liquidating some crypto to prepare for a burst of splashy IPOs, with SpaceX going first and AI titans OpenAI and Anthropic likely to follow. Saylor pointed to “capital rotation” toward the AI boom as a key reason that bitcoin is resetting.

Crypto’s biggest upcoming event, meanwhile, is TBD: Investors are growing frustrated waiting for passage of the Clarity Act. Bitcoin’s most prominent corporate maximalist, Strategy, showing even a small stutter in its step could hurt confidence at a sensitive time:

• Public companies have piled into crypto during the industry-friendly Trump era, and together they now hold 1.24 million bitcoin. Companies that copied Strategy’s playbook could be backing out of their positions in Saylor’s wake.
• Spot bitcoin ETFs, which have helped drive the crypto’s gains in the past, set a record for consecutive outflows this week as investors liquidated $4.4 billion over 13 days.

Waiting Game: While there are many reasons bitcoin enthusiasm could be waning, bitcoin might also be experiencing normal growing pains that long-term HODLers know all too well. Wolfe Research wrote in a note that bitcoin’s four-year cycle could see the token dip below $40,000 this fall before picking back up.