Reasons of YTD’s Stock Market Volatility
AI continues to dominate the US stock market this year. Besides semiconductors, servers, communications, data centers, and even the power and energy sectors becoming market darlings, almost all software stocks have experienced the biggest sell-off since the dot-com bubble.
Major reasons include: Anthropic’s product line highlighting the impact of AI on various industries; the massive spending of cloud service providers eroding profits (as shown in below table), causing investor resentment; the six-year bull market having already overvalued US stocks; and Trump’s tariff defeat and the US-Israel attacks on Iran further deepening the volatility in the US stock market.
Top 10 AI corp CapEx, debt, and FCF
| US stock code | 2026 Expenditure (USD billion) | New Corporate Bonds (US$1 billion) | Total liabilities (US$ billion) | 2026 expected free cash flow |
| AMZN | 200(+50%) | 57 | 220.5 | Negative |
| GOOGL | 185(+100%) | 32 | 79 | Negative value or significant reduction of 90% |
| META | 135(+87%) | 30 | 58.74 | Negative |
| MSFT | 105(+66%) | NA | 123.3 | positive but reduced by 28% |
| ORCL | 50(+138%) | 30 | 140 | Negative |
| TSLA | 20(+134%) | NA | 14.72 | Negative |
| APPL | 14(+10%) | 4.5 | 90.51 | $119 billion |
| NVDA | 8.8(+159%) | 3.8 | 10.48 | $105 billion |
| TSM | 56(+80%) | 20 | 31.7 | $42 billion |
| SSNLF | 73(+108%) | NA | 18 | $68 billion |
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