“A real bloodbath”: biggest fall since 2020, $3.2 trillion gone up in smoke, Wall Street and AI panic after Trump’s defeat

Day of debacle on the markets. Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft... AI-related stocks tumbled on global stock markets on Thursday, with investors fearing that the construction of data centers would be slowed down in the United States, after the overwhelming victory of the Democrats in the American mid-term elections.

“We are witnessing today a total collapse of technology stocks, to a level that can be described as capitulation,” summarized Neil Wilson, analyst for Saxo Markets. In New York, the Nasdaq index - with a strong technological coloring - plunged 5.52%, showing its biggest fall since April 2025. It entered the so-called correction phase, which means that it lost more than 10% compared to its peak at the beginning of October.

Also erasing their entire gains recorded the day before, the broader S&P 500 index slipped 4.35% and the Dow lost 3.44%. According to the Financial Times, American stocks lost $3.2 trillion in one day.

Bloomberg has calculated for its part that this is the biggest drop in American stocks since 2020. “A real bloodbath” In the process, the Nikkei, star index of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and the Kospi, in Seoul, ended the week with a plunge of around 6%. “We thought we were out of the woods after the market rebound following the midterm elections, but suddenly it's a real bloodbath,” comments Jose Torres, analyst at Interactive Brokers.

Donald Trump accused Thursday evening on his Truth Social network "the Democrats, not the Republicans", of being responsible. The European indices, where the weight of tech is less heavy, have mostly fallen, but to a lesser extent. Frankfurt lost 0.43% like London.

Milan lost 1.03%. Paris even gained 0.34%. 800 billion losses for the “Magnificent 7” The markets are ultimately analyzing the results of the “midterms” as a brake on the development of AI, while several newly elected Democrats campaigned to slow down the construction of data centers in their constituencies.

And residents of dozens of American cities adopted restrictions or bans on “data centers” on Tuesday. However, the massive investments of tech giants in AI and the construction of data centers in the United States constitute one of the main drivers of the stock markets and American growth in recent years. Semiconductor and electronic chip companies, essential elements for equipping these data centers, are the main victims of this movement.

In New York, Broadcom fell 10.15%, Micron 17.17% and AMD 17.39%. The juggernaut Nvidia, the second largest capitalization in the world, fell by 8.91%, a loss of around 400 billion dollars. The Magnificent Seven - nickname given to the heavyweights of American tech (Nvidia, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, etc.

Machine-translated from French