Nvidia sinks 9% as the Nasdaq has its worst day since April 2025
New York's tech-heavy index closed Thursday down 5.52%, its biggest one-day fall since the April 2025 tariff shock. Chipmakers lost more than 12% as Wall Street repriced the AI build-out after the midterms and reports that China is holding back H200 imports.
The Nasdaq Composite, home of Wall Street’s big tech names, closed Thursday 5 November down 5.52%. That is 1,421 points gone, a close of 24,315, and the index’s worst day since April 2025, when the US tariff announcement rattled every market at once.
Nvidia, now the stock everyone reads as the temperature of the AI race, fell 9.26% to $181.60. The Philadelphia semiconductor index lost more than 12%. The closing figures are in Fox Business’s report on the session, which also has the S&P 500 down 4.36% and the Dow off 1,833 points (3.44%).
The biggest losers
It wasn’t only chipmakers. Tesla dropped 10.77%. Companies that rent out AI computing capacity, such as IREN, Applied Digital and Nebius, each lost more than 14%. Meta, Amazon and Alphabet got off with falls of roughly 2% to 4%, which tells you where the fear sat: in data-centre spending, not in advertising or online shopping.
The session also pushed the Nasdaq into correction territory, meaning more than 10% below its most recent peak.
Why now
Traders pointed to two things. The first is politics. Democrats won both the House and the Senate in Tuesday’s midterms, and electricity bills turned data centres into a campaign issue, with some Democrats calling for tighter rules or pauses on new projects. The market read that as a sign the AI build-out could get slower and more expensive.
The second is China. According to Reuters, as cited by Fortune, around 600,000 Nvidia H200 chips are sitting in Hong Kong waiting to cross into the mainland, while Beijing has only been approving small batches of about 10,000 to protect its own chip industry. Neither Nvidia nor the Chinese government has confirmed those figures.
Not everyone thinks the move is justified. One US fund manager called it a possible capitulation phase for data-centre stocks, the point where nervous holders sell everything at once. Anyone with equity funds or pension savings tilted towards tech has already felt the week, and the next few sessions will show whether this was a stumble or a change of mood. It is not the first jolt this autumn either: in October Intel lost almost 29% in a day despite beating forecasts.
By Oliver Grant
Image: Daniel J. Prostak / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
