Wall Street erases $2.3 trillion from AI in one day, just 10 days after Anthropic’s stock market debut

The Nasdaq 100 lost on Thursday 2.3 trillion dollars market value in a single session, its worst drop since March 2020, according to data time.news and Yahoo Finance. Behind the collapse are the companies that had benefited the most from the rise of AI and, especially, those linked to the construction of data centers.

As explained Associated Pressthe Nasdaq Composite fell 5.5% and is already 11.9% below the all-time high it set last month. In the market, a loss of more than 10% is known as a correction. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, meanwhile, sank more than 12%.

Talking about proper names is the best way to understand what is happening. He first notable case is that of NVIDIAwhich fell 9.3% and was, by far, the value that weighed the most on the S&P 500, which closed with its worst day since the April 2025 tariffs.

With this drop, the company has already accumulated 2.6% losses so far this year. AMD plunged 17.3% and Micron 17%, while CoreWeave, which rents access to AI chips in the cloud, fell 9.8%. The situation is similar for Intel, which has been falling sharply for a week.

You may be wondering why all this is happening right now. Associated Press points to the concern that the construction of data centers will slow down due to how expensive it is to borrow money and remembers that some critics have been talking about a bubble for some time.

The Nikkei enters a bear market

With a clear domino effect, the decline moved to Asia on Friday. According to the sources consulted, the Japanese Nikkei 225 fell 6.2% and was more than 20% below the maximum it reached in June, which is known as bear market.

KIOXIA and SoftBank Group each lost 11%, in the case of the former after presenting lower-than-expected forecasts. In South Korea, the Kospi fell by more than 8% in the morning and activated the mechanisms that suspended trading for 20 minutes, with SK Hynix down 9%.

The midterms and the IPO of Anthropic

Obviously, added to all this is the result of Tuesday’s midterm elections in the United States. It is a relationship that media such as the Associated Press make, since the victories of the Democrats open the possibility that governments force to pause the construction of new data centers. We are at a time when many citizens are beginning to distrust AI and reject the increases in the electricity bill that these installations cause, in addition to many other problems. A slowdown in these works would mean, in turn, fewer purchases of AI chips.

This scenario complicates the IPO of Anthropic, which submitted its application on October 26 to list. The company plans to begin trading on November 16, with an estimated valuation of between 1.5 and 2 trillion dollars and with which it could raise up to 100,000 million. We’ll see how all this ends up affecting Dario Amodei’s laboratory.