October’s job losses in the U.S. were nearly twice as high as a month earlier — the steepest for any October since 2003, data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas showed.

The technology sector was the hardest hit, with 33,281 cuts, almost six times September’s total.

Being laid off is an awful feeling — and it must feel bitterly ironic to work in a field that’s developing the very technology making you redundant.

One person spared both redundancy fears and existential doubt is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who just had a nearly $1 trillion pay package approved by Tesla shareholders.

To earn the full trillion, though, Musk has to meet a chain of performance targets, culminating in Tesla reaching an $8.5 trillion valuation.

Its market cap is currently $1.54 trillion — by contrast, the world’s most valuable company now is Nvidia, which briefly hit a $5 trillion valuation last Wednesday.

After Thursday’s slump in tech stocks, however, Nvidia’s market cap has dipped to a “mere” $4.57 trillion.

Other tech companies, such as Microsoft, Broadcom and Palantir Technologies, also fell broadly over concerns that their stock prices are too high. Those moves dragged the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite down by 1.9%.

For most tech workers and investors, Thursday was another reminder of volatility’s sting. For Elon Musk, it was just another day on the road to the stratosphere.

Inside the Gulf’s trillion-dollar AI gamble

After raking in trillions of dollars in oil revenue, the Gulf monarchies have become known for splashing cash on big-ticket projects like sci-fi-worthy cities in the desert, major sports franchises, and advanced military hardware.

Now, though, as they face prolonged lower crude prices, some of the region’s leaders are looking at leveraging their vast sovereign capital to build domestic artificial intelligence industries.

— Emma Graham

Shares of Japan’s SoftBank Group resumed their slide on Friday, following a broader slump in AI-related stocks as investors once again grew wary of the sector’s lofty valuations.

The group, which holds a wide range of AI investments across infrastructure, semiconductor, and application companies, saw shares drop more than 8%.

This comes after SoftBank gained nearly 3% in the previous session, having plunged 10% on Wednesday to clock its worst day since April. It stares at about $53 billion market cap wipeout this week and its worst weekly loss since March 2020, if Friday’s losses hold.

“SoftBank Group’s shares are falling as many bought it as the only listed proxy for OpenAI,” said David Gibson, senior research analyst at financial services firm MST Financial.

The pullback reflects growing caution around the AI sector and a realization that many of OpenAI’s partnerships are still potential rather than confirmed, with funding prospects uncertain, he told CNBC.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly said the company has spoken with the U.S. government about potential federal loan guarantees to encourage chip factory construction. His comments came after OpenAI’s CFO suggested the firm hoped for federal help in securing chip financing.

SoftBank holds a controlling stake in U.K.-based semiconductor designer Arm Holdings, whose chips help power mobile and AI processors globally. Shares of Nasdaq-listed Arm slid 1.21% overnight.

Separately, Bloomberg recently reported citing people familiar with the matter that the group considered acquiring U.S. chipmaker Marvell Technology Inc. earlier this year.

Other Japanese tech stocks also declined. Semiconductor testing equipment maker Advantest dropped over 6%, chipmaker Renesas Electronics fell nearly 4%, Tokyo Electron, a chip production equipment maker, declined 1.46%.

Shares of the world’s largest chipmaker, TSMC, fell 0.6%.

Nvidia-supplier SK Hynix was down over 1% and South Korean peer and memory chipmaker Samsung fell 0.5%.

The declines in Asian tech stocks also come after AI-related companies in the U.S. fell overnight

Qualcomm dropped almost 4%, despite strong quarterly results, after warning it could lose future Apple business. AMD, a strong performer Wednesday, slipped 7%, while Palantir and Oracle were down about 7% and 3%, respectively. Nvidia and Meta Platforms also finished lower.

The excitement surrounding AI has raised worries that markets might be experiencing a tech bubble. Some experts argue that the valuations of AI companies are starting to resemble the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, with stock prices rising well beyond realistic profit forecasts.

The economic impact of artificial intelligence is undeniable and market bumps are inevitable, said Laura Cooper, global investment strategist at Nuveen.

“Still, it’s too soon to call a bubble. Today’s AI capex is being funded largely by cash-rich firms with solid balance sheets, not cheap credit or speculation,” she said. “The greater risk isn’t a bubble bursting, but valuation fatigue — investors tiring of paying ever-richer premiums for AI returns that don’t materialize quickly enough.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Thursday that the artificial intelligence startup is on track to generate more than $20 billion in annualized revenue run rate this year, with plans to grow to hundreds of billions in sales by 2030.

The company has inked more than $1.4 trillion of infrastructure deals in recent months to try and build out the data centers it says are needed to meet growing demand. The staggering sum has raised questions from investors and others in the industry about where OpenAI will come up with the money.

“We are trying to build the infrastructure for a future economy powered by AI, and given everything we see on the horizon in our research program, this is the time to invest to be really scaling up our technology,” Altman wrote in a post on X. “Massive infrastructure projects take quite awhile to build, so we have to start now.”

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, but has become one of the fastest-growing commercial entities on the planet following the launch of its chatbot ChatGPT in 2022. The startup is currently valued at $500 billion, though it’s still not profitable.

In September, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC that OpenAI was on track to generate $13 billion in revenue this year.

Friar caught the attention of the Trump administration this week after she saying at at event that OpenAI is looking to create an ecosystem of banks, private equity and a federal “backstop” or “guarantee” that could help the company finance its investments in cutting-edge chips. 

She clarified those comments late Wednesday, writing in a post on LinkedIn that OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for its infrastructure commitments.

“I used the word ‘backstop’ and it muddied the point,” Friar wrote. “As the full clip of my answer shows, I was making the point that American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part.”

Venture capitalist David Sacks, who is serving as President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, said Thursday that there will be “no federal bailout for AI.” He wrote in a post on X that if one frontier model company in the U.S. fails, another will take its place.

Altman said Thursday that OpenAI does “not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI datacenters.” He said taxpayers should not bail out companies that make poor decisions, and that “if we get it wrong, that’s on us.”

“This is the bet we are making, and given our vantage point, we feel good about it,” Altman wrote. “But we of course could be wrong, and the market—not the government—will deal with it if we are.”

WATCH: Trump AI czar David Sacks says ‘no federal bailout for AI’ after OpenAI CFO’s comments