Markets NOW JUN 26, 2026

Nasdaq Logs Fifth Straight Down Day as AI Selloff Deepens; ServiceNow Bucks Tape +7.4%

The Nasdaq has fallen more than 6% from its June 2 high as investors revolt against AI capex, but NOW surged Friday on an expanded IBM partnership and broker bullishness.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

The Nasdaq is set to open 1.2% lower Friday, a fifth consecutive losing session that drags the index more than 6% below its June 2 all-time high. The selloff is no longer a wobble. It’s the market re-pricing the AI capex story in real time.

Overnight, South Korea’s Kospi shed 5.8%, vaporizing a chunk of a year-to-date rally that had run close to 100%. Thursday’s US tape was the same trade in slower motion: the Nasdaq closed at 25,358.60, down 0.46%, the fourth straight down day and the first such streak since February. Apple fell 6% after announcing MacBook and iPad price hikes. Nvidia and Amazon each shed more than 2%. The Dow printed an intraday record of 52,655.66 before closing at 51,920.62, which is its own kind of signal: the rotation out of mega-cap AI names isn’t risk-off, it’s discriminating.

The week’s most violent print sits offshore from the index drama. SpaceX, public for two weeks, dropped 17% Monday in what Bloomberg called the second-largest one-day market-cap wipeout on record, with shares trading as low as $147 by Tuesday. A two-week-old listing rarely sets the tone for a sector. This one did.

Against that backdrop, ServiceNow is the anomaly. NOW traded up 7.36% in premarket, the third-best print in the S&P 500 behind Moderna at +14.90% and FactSet at +8.90%. The catalyst is the June 11 expansion of its IBM collaboration, threading watsonx, Red Hat Ansible, IBM Bob, IBM Instana, and HashiCorp’s Terraform and Vault into a platform that already runs more than 85 billion workflows annually. Joint solutions are slated for the second half of 2026.

“Most enterprises have the ambition to deploy agentic AI, but lack the foundation to run it at scale,” said John Aisien, GM of central product management at ServiceNow. That’s the bull thesis distilled: the picks-and-shovels layer survives a hyperscaler capex revolt because it sells the substrate, not the dream.

Wedbush’s Dan Ives, reading channel checks across Asia and enterprise AI, sees “no cracks in the armor.” The tape, for a fifth straight session, disagrees. The reconciliation between those two views is what the next quarter is actually about.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.