Nasdaq plunges 5.2% as AI datacenter fears erase $3 trillion

The selloff marks a sharp reversal from Wednesday, when shares rallied after Democrats retook the Senate and House of Representatives. Voters overwhelmingly approved candidates and ballot measures aimed at curtailing the buildout of AI datacenters in the U.S., and that reality appeared to hit tech investors more forcefully on Thursday as early signs of changing business conditions came into focus.

The pain was not uniform. Chip stocks were among the worst hit, with Micron and AMD each down roughly 14% and Nvidia down 8%, while Google—whose search advertising business underpins its cloud operations—fell a more modest 1.6%. Neocloud companies, which have taken on large amounts of debt to build datacenters competing with Amazon and Google, were particularly hard hit: CoreWeave was down 9% on Thursday and on track for an 18% decline over the past two days. The turmoil also spread to software stocks like Salesforce and Snowflake, and even to gig economy and streaming names including DoorDash, Uber, Spotify, and Netflix.

Some observers cautioned that markets can overreact in the short term to speculation about future winners and losers. Still, the day's scale—the biggest drop since the April 2025 tariff announcement—underscores how sensitive tech valuations have become to any signal that the datacenter spending engine might slow.