The Nasdaq Composite fell 5.52% on Thursday, November 5, 2026, its steepest one-day decline in 19 months, according to Reuters, as the Philadelphia Semiconductor index fell more than 12%. Reuters reported that Democrats won control of Congress on Tuesday, including in states where opposition to new data centers has grown, and that investors worried stricter oversight could slow the buildout of AI infrastructure that has helped push stocks to record highs this year. Bloomberg, in a report Lens could not open, is cited elsewhere as putting the Nasdaq 100’s loss at 6.4%, or about $2.3 trillion in market value.

Index moves, per Reuters

  • Nasdaq Composite: down 5.52% to 24,315.00, more than 10% below its October 6 record close, which Reuters says confirmed a technical correction.
  • S&P 500: down 4.36% to 7,353.73. About $3 trillion of value was erased from S&P 500 companies.
  • Dow Jones Industrial Average: down 3.44% to 51,523.06.
  • Philadelphia Semiconductor index: down more than 12%.
  • 26.9 billion shares traded, against a 20-session average of 17.7 billion. The S&P 500 was still up 7.4% for the year and the Nasdaq up 4.6%.

Biggest decliners

Reuters lists IREN and Applied Digital down more than 14%; CoreWeave down almost 10%; Qualcomm down 9.5% after missing Wall Street’s fourth-quarter smartphone chip sales estimates; Nvidia down more than 9%; GE Vernova down 7.5%; Meta Platforms down 4%; Constellation Energy down 2.5%; and Amazon and Alphabet each down 2.2%. According to 24/7 Wall St, Nvidia fell 9.26% to $181.60, Micron fell 17.46%, Lam Research fell 16.36%, and the iShares and VanEck semiconductor ETFs fell 12.15% and 11.21%. The same article says the PHLX index’s 12.25% drop was its largest since March 2020. IBTimes UK, citing CNBC, says Nvidia lost almost $450 billion in market value.

Causes cited

  • Melissa Brown of SimCorp told Reuters that some newly elected officials are “looking to slow the pace of AI infrastructure development.”
  • Jed Ellerbroek of Argent Capital Management called it “the capitulation phase for the data center capex beneficiary stocks” and said he considered the size of the moves excessive.
  • Reuters also notes that two Federal Reserve officials hinted at possible rate hikes, that traders expect another increase next month after a September hike, and that Qualcomm’s results weighed on its shares. IBTimes UK lists rising interest rates, concerns about debt growing faster than revenue and doubts about AI spending returns among the factors investors cited.
  • 24/7 Wall St says the hardest-hit names make equipment and memory and depend on future spending plans, so investors appeared to price in a slowdown in future spending more than a drop in current orders.

Elsewhere and afterward

IBTimes UK reports that on November 6 South Korea’s Kospi fell more than 6% and Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 5.9%, entering bear-market territory, while European shares opened sharply lower and later eased. 24/7 Wall St reports that chip stocks rebounded broadly on Friday: Nvidia rose 2.78% to $186.64 after trading as high as $194.90, leaving it down 8.8% for the week and 22% below its October 6 record close of $239.24. It adds that investor Michael Burry reportedly took profits on a quarter of his bet against the VanEck Semiconductor ETF after Thursday’s drop. Chart analyst Frank Cappelleri told IBTimes UK that the Nasdaq has been higher 12 months after a midterm election in all but one of 13 cycles since 1974, adding that “the path can be a volatile one.”

Sources and notes

This post is based on Reuters’ report by Noel Randewich and Utkarsh Hathi as republished by Yahoo Finance (November 5, 2026), 24/7 Wall St (Jeremy Phillips, November 7) and IBTimes UK (Isaiah Rosvel Diaz, November 6). The Nasdaq 100 figures come from Bloomberg’s coverage as cited in search results and by a secondary site; Lens could not open Bloomberg’s article. Percentages differ by index, by ETF and by source, and Lens did not check them against exchange data. Lens covered one of the cited triggers in an earlier post on data-center ballot measures.

Image: bronze bear and bull sculptures outside the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, by Dietmar Rabich via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; cropped. Stand-in photo; it is not related to the Nasdaq selloff and does not show the events described.