One stock carried a large share of the damage. Nvidia's market value shrank by about $440 billion on Thursday, Moneycontrol reported, as the shares gave up 8%.
Nothing the company itself published set that off. The trigger was an election result, and the selling concentrated on the companies tied to artificial intelligence and the construction of data centers.
Key numbers
- 5.52% the Nasdaq 100's fall on Thursday, per Moneycontrol, taking the index to around 24,416 points
- $440 billion the drop in Nvidia's market value in that session, alongside an 8% fall in the share price
- 10% the decline in both Tesla and SpaceX, a combined loss of roughly $420 billion
- 3.5% and 2.4% the falls in the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average the same day
The vote hit chip stocks before anything else
Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in this week's midterm elections, a result City A.M. described as a check on President Trump's power. Several of the winning campaigns had made artificial intelligence and data center construction an issue.
Money moved out of technology shares once the result was clear, City A.M. reported. The Nasdaq 100, which follows 100 of the largest non-financial companies listed in the United States, lost more than 5% and traded near 24,416 points.
Broadcom was down 9% and Nvidia 8%, according to City A.M. Tesla and SpaceX each lost 10% on the day.
In plain words: chipmakers sell much of their hardware to the companies building data centers, the warehouses of computers that run AI software. When investors start to doubt how much of that building will actually get approved and paid for, they cut the price they are willing to pay for the chip suppliers first. The policy question arrives before any change in orders does.
Banks and London were pulled in as well
Financial shares opened higher on Thursday and then turned with everything else, City A.M. reported. JPMorgan closed the day 4% lower and Goldman Sachs 3.7% lower.
The move crossed the Atlantic in the afternoon. The FTSE 100 ended 0.4% down, with Polar Capital, which runs a large AI equity portfolio, and the technology infrastructure firm Computacenter both off 7%.
What the reports agree on, and what they leave out
I went through three reports on the session, and they line up on the direction and the names, less so on the exact size. City A.M. put the Nasdaq 100 fall at more than 5%, Moneycontrol at 5.52%, while the Times of India headlined $2.5 trillion of value lost in a single day.
None of the reports I read sets out how the 10% figure for SpaceX was measured. Earlier in the week, as results came in, Tesla and SpaceX had already been quoted about 4% lower in premarket trading.
One other number from City A.M. puts the politics in context: Elon Musk spent around $474 million on this election cycle, which the outlet called the largest single-cycle total by a political donor in modern American history.