Shares of Electronic Arts headed for their steepest drop since 1999 after the video game publisher cut its full-year bookings guidance, due mostly to challenges with its soccer franchise.

The stock plummeted 19% to $115.86 as of mid-day on Thursday. That would be its worst day on the market since the dot-com bubble and the stock’s third-biggest drop since EA’s public market debut in 1990.

For the fiscal third quarter, which ended Dec. 31, EA said late Wednesday that it expects to report about $2.215 billion in net bookings, versus previous guidance of $2.4 billion to $2.55 billion. Revenue in the December quarter was about $1.88 billion, with $1.11 in diluted earnings per share, the company said in a statement.

EA said that “Dragon Age” and its EA Sports FC franchise “underperformed our net bookings expectations.”

“Weakness has been seen largely from the Global Football franchises,” analysts at Roth MKM wrote in a report on Thursday, calling the earnings pre-announcement a “big stumble.” They have the equivalent of a hold rating on the stock.

EA said it expects net bookings for the full fiscal year, ending March 31, of between $7 billion and $7.15 billion, below previous guidance of $7.5 billion to $7.8 billion. EA says net bookings include physical game sales as well as revenue from online games.

The warning points to weakness in the most prominent soccer video game franchise since 1993. It used to fall under the FIFA branding, but in 2022 EA’s deal with FIFA ended and the last two EA soccer games have been sold as EA Sports FC.

The company also said that role-playing game “Dragon Age” had 1.5 million players during the quarter, which was about 50% below its expectations.

EA said it expects Global Football sales to be down on a year-over-year basis, and said that bookings from online sales, or live services, would also decline in fiscal 2025. The company’s soccer franchise, accounted for the majority of the live services shortfall.

EA plans to release full third-quarter results on Feb. 4.

WATCH: Interview with EA CEO Andrew Wilson

The U.S. may have led China in the artificial intelligence race for the past decade, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day, everything changed.

Wang, whose company provides training data to key AI players including OpenAI, Google and Meta, said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that DeepSeek, the leading Chinese AI lab, released an “earth-shattering model” on Christmas Day, then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek-R1, which competes with OpenAI’s recently released o1 model.

“What we’ve found is that DeepSeek … is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models,” Wang said.

In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the artificial intelligence race between the U.S. and China as an “AI war,” adding that he believes China has significantly more Nvidia H100 GPUs — AI chips that are widely used to build leading powerful AI models — than people may think, especially considering U.S. export controls.

Wang also said he believes the AI sector will reach a trillion dollars, on par with estimates that the generative AI market is poised to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

“The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure,” Wang said, later adding, “We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom.”

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump announced a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to invest billions of dollars in U.S. AI infrastructure. The project, Stargate, was unveiled at the White House by Trump, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Key initial technology partners will include Microsoft, Nvidia and Oracle, as well as semiconductor company Arm. They said they would invest $100 billion to start and up to $500 billion over the next four years.

In the interview Thursday, Wang said he believes that it’ll take two to four years to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a widely cited but vaguely defined benchmark used in the AI sector to denote a branch of AI pursuing technology that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks. AGI is a hotly debated topic, with some leaders saying we’re close to attaining it and some saying it’s not possible at all. Wang said his own definition of AGI is “powerful AI systems that are able to use a computer just like you or I could … and basically be a remote worker in the most capable way.”

Anthropic, the Amazon-backed AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, ramped up its technology development throughout the past year, and in October, the startup said that its AI agents were able to use computers like humans can to complete complex tasks. Anthropic’s Computer Use capability allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing, the startup said.

The tool can “use computers in basically the same way that we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview at the time. He said it can do tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps.”

OpenAI reportedly plans to introduce a similar feature soon.

When asked which U.S. artificial intelligence startups are leading the AI race right now, Wang said that models each have their own strengths — for instance, OpenAI’s models are great at reasoning, while Anthropic’s are great at coding.

“The space is becoming more competitive, not less competitive,” he said.

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the name of DeepSeek’s reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek-R1.

South Korea’s SK Hynix, one of the largest memory chipmakers in the world, posted record quarterly earnings on Thursday, supported by strong sales of high bandwidth memory (HBM) used in generative AI.

Here are SK Hynix’s fourth-quarter results compared with LSEG SmartEstimate, which is weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:

• Revenue: 19.77 trillion won ($13.7 billion) vs. 19.91 trillion won
• Operating profit: 8.08 trillion won ($5.6 billion) vs. 8.02 trillion won

Operating profit in the October-December quarter grew 15% since the previous quarter to another record-high, as did revenue, which rose 12%. 

The chipmaker has benefitted from a boom in artificial intelligence servers and is a key supplier to U.S. chip designer Nvidia.

“SK Hynix emphasized that with prolonged strong demand for AI memory, the company achieved [an] all-time high result through world-leading HBM technology and profitability-oriented operation,” the company said in its earnings release. 

HBM is a type of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, in which chips are vertically stacked to save space and reduce power consumption. The technology is often used in products such as laptops and PCs. 

SK Hynix, Micron Technology and Samsung Electronics are the three top manufacturers of HBM chips.

The strong fourth-quarter numbers conclude a year that saw the company reach record yearly revenue, exceeding the previous high in 2022 by over 21 trillion won. Meanwhile, operating profit, beat a record set in 2018 during a “super boom” in the semiconductor industry.

Correction: This article has been revised to reflect updated quarter-on-quarter growth data after SK Hynix amended its press release.