After a huge stock market rally on Wednesday following the decisive Democratic win in the U.S. midterms, stocks tumbled sharply on Thursday as investors feared a slowdown in data center construction and the AI industry as a whole.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,600 points on Thursday, about 3 percent of its value, according to CNBC. The S&P 500, a stock market index of large companies, and the tech-centered Nasdaq index, also dived on Thursday, with the latter dropping approximately 5 percent, the New York Times reported.
The massive drops in the stock market indexes even stoked fears of a Wall Street trading freeze. The S&P 500 drop reached 3.8 percent at one point on Thursday; at 7 percent, a market-mandated “circuit breaker” kicks in and forces a pause on all trading for 15 minutes.
The circuit breakers are intended to halt severe market crashes. A 13 percent drop in the S&P 500 leads to another forced freeze on trading, while a 20 percent crash ends trading for the day.
Chipmakers like Nvidia and Qualcomm took a big hit on Wall Street, as investors anticipated more regulation of the AI industry from Democratic legislators taking power in January.
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An X post from Bernie Sanders may have contributed to the investor fears, with the Democratic senator calling for a national data center moratorium (in all caps) late on Wednesday.
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Shares of Tesla and SpaceX, both run by Republican mega-donor Elon Musk, dropped on Thursday for the second day, with potential regulatory pressure — and investigations — on the horizon.
For tech companies, it may not just be the incoming Senate and House that will expose them to more scrutiny, but the wave of Democratic governors taking office in 2027. Many of those governors-elect have spoken out against data centers and will be key deciders on whether construction of Silicon Valley’s mega-projects moves forward.
“In many ways, what happened in state-level races around the U.S. are arguably just as important,” as the Senate and House elections, Kent Fung, vice president of market intelligence at Fundstrat, told the Times. “Not just to Americans, but to investors.”
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