A.I. Bloodbath: Chip Stocks Lose $1.45 Trillion in a Single Day
Set Trending Topics as a preferred source on Google.
One trading day, and the chip industry is $1.45 trillion poorer: On Thursday, two days after the Democrats’ election victory, the 16 largest semiconductor companies traded in the United States lost a combined $1.45 trillion in market value. Nvidia alone shed about $447 billion, nearly as much as Tesla and SpaceX have lost since Election Day combined. We ran the numbers on who was hit how hard: chips, neoclouds and A.I. software.
How We Calculated
The figures are based on Thursday’s closing prices and the market values reported by CompaniesMarketCap. From each company’s market value after the close and its daily percentage loss, we calculated its value on the previous day and thus the loss in dollars. Only shares traded in the United States are included, since Asian and European exchanges were already trading Friday’s session at the time of the analysis.
Chips: $1.45 Trillion Gone
Semiconductors were hit hardest. On a weighted basis, the 16 companies lost an average of 11.3 percent in one day, with memory chip makers and equipment suppliers losing considerably more:
| Company | Thursday’s drop | Loss | Market value after |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nvidia | 9.3% | $447.5B | $4,385B |
| TSMC | 10.8% | $221.2B | $1,831B |
| Broadcom | 10.4% | $162.0B | $1,391B |
| Micron | 17.5% | $157.1B | $743B |
| AMD | 17.3% | $138.4B | $663B |
| ASML | 9.3% | $53.8B | $523B |
| Lam Research | 16.4% | $45.3B | $232B |
| Applied Materials | 13.6% | $39.8B | $253B |
| Intel | 10.3% | $32.0B | $278B |
| Texas Instruments | 10.7% | $30.5B | $254B |
| Arm | 13.1% | $26.8B | $178B |
| KLA | 13.3% | $26.0B | $169B |
| Marvell | 16.4% | $23.6B | $120B |
| Analog Devices | 11.1% | $21.9B | $175B |
| Qualcomm | 9.5% | $17.6B | $167B |
| Astera Labs | 19.6% | $7.7B | $31B |
| Total | 11.3% | $1,451.1B |
Source: CompaniesMarketCap, Trending Topics calculation
The plunge in memory chips and manufacturing equipment stands out. Micron, AMD, Lam Research and Marvell each lost more than 16 percent. They depend most heavily on new data centers, whose construction the new Congress and several states want to slow. According to an analysis by Data Center Watch, 78 percent of newly elected members of Congress want to regulate or restrict data centers.
Neoclouds: Small Sums, Big Percentages
In absolute terms, the neoclouds, cloud providers specializing in A.I., play a small role. In percentage terms, however, they were hit hardest, losing nearly 13 percent on average:
| Company | Thursday’s drop | Loss | Market value after |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nebius | 14.9% | $5.4B | $30.6B |
| CoreWeave | 9.8% | $2.6B | $24.1B |
| IREN | 17.0% | $1.5B | $7.3B |
| TeraWulf | 13.9% | $0.8B | $5.0B |
| Core Scientific | 10.8% | $0.4B | $3.7B |
| Cipher Mining | 14.6% | $0.4B | $2.5B |
| Hut 8 | 6.1% | $0.4B | $5.5B |
| Total | 12.8% | $11.5B |
Source: CompaniesMarketCap, Trending Topics calculation
For the neoclouds, Thursday was just the latest blow. Even before the election, CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN had lost up to 40 percent in a single month. Many of these companies carry heavy debt and depend on new data centers coming online in Texas and elsewhere.
A.I. Software: Getting Off Lightly
Software companies held up much better. The 16 companies with losses shed a combined $380 billion, but mostly only in the low single digits in percentage terms. The exception is Palantir, down almost 10 percent:
| Company | Thursday’s drop | Loss | Market value after |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft | 3.6% | $147.7B | $3,979B |
| Alphabet | 1.9% | $68.5B | $3,463B |
| Meta | 4.0% | $63.8B | $1,547B |
| Palantir | 9.7% | $40.3B | $373B |
| Oracle | 6.9% | $26.7B | $359B |
| Snowflake | 7.3% | $7.4B | $95B |
| IBM | 2.8% | $6.8B | $234B |
| ServiceNow | 5.9% | $6.7B | $106B |
| Datadog | 7.5% | $5.1B | $63B |
| Salesforce | 2.1% | $3.9B | $183B |
| Dynatrace | 6.6% | $0.9B | $12.5B |
| Adobe | 0.8% | $0.8B | $96B |
| SentinelOne | 8.8% | $0.7B | $7.5B |
| UiPath | 3.7% | $0.3B | $6.8B |
| C3 AI | 4.9% | $0.1B | $1.8B |
| SoundHound | 1.4% | $0.03B | $1.9B |
| AppLovin | up 31.0% | gain of $28.2B | $119B |
| Total excluding AppLovin | 3.4% | $379.7B |
Source: CompaniesMarketCap, Trending Topics calculation
The only big winner is AppLovin. Shares of the ad tech company jumped 31 percent after strong quarterly results. The big platforms Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta also got off comparatively lightly with losses of 2 to 4 percent, even though their sheer size meant large losses in absolute terms.
Why Software Fared Better
The pattern is clear: The closer a company is to building data centers, the harder it was punished. The market apparently expects moratoriums in Texas, Georgia and Ohio, along with tighter rules from Congress, to slow the buildout and dampen demand for chips and computing power. According to Goldman Sachs, short-term construction freezes could affect about 45 percent of the planned U.S. buildout. For the big platforms, however, investors also see an upside. On Wednesday, the first trading day after the election, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple even rose sharply, as traders bet that Democrats would slow the tech giants’ costly A.I. spending, according to Bloomberg.
One Day Doesn’t Make a Trend
Whether the selloff turns into a longer downturn remains to be seen. The rotation out of A.I. stocks had already begun before the election, and the vote provided an occasion to take profits. According to Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo, earnings at S&P 500 companies are still growing strongly, and any law against data centers would first have to pass both chambers of Congress and survive President Trump’s veto. The next signals will come with the U.S. jobs report on Friday and inflation data on Tuesday. The figures also reflect only a single trading day.
