On Thursday, US stocks suffered their worst fall since 2020. The Nasdaq alone lost about $2.5 trillion in capitalization per day. Investors are afraid of the "blue wave": the new Congress and Democratic governors may slow down the construction of data centers, which are the basis of the entire artificial intelligence boom. Following Wall Street, the tech sell-off swept through Asia and into Europe (the STOXX 600 was down 1.6% by Friday morning, and national indexes were down 1% each), with money flowing into safe-haven bonds. The CEOs of Nvidia, SpaceX and Oracle suffered the most. Together they lost almost 105 billion dollars, Elon Musk became the poorest of all, and Jensen Huang fell out of the ten richest people in the world.
The market's concerns are not unfounded. According to Bloomberg estimates, about 40% of the planned data center capacity in the United States is in states where new governors promised in the campaign to slow down the development of artificial intelligence. They already have an example: in July, the governor of New York was the first in the country to introduce a moratorium on the construction of large data centers for up to a year. Voters support such measures because data centers drive up electricity bills. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 69% of Democrats and even 43% of Republicans approve of restrictions on their construction.
It turns out that the artificial intelligence boom, which has been pushing the American market up for four years, now boils down to local politics and electricity bills.