U.S. President Donald Trump blamed Democrats for Thursday's stock market selloff after the Nasdaq Composite fell 5.5 percent on 5 November 2026, its steepest slide since April 2025, according to CNBC. "The Stock Market crashed today because the Dumocrats had a big Tuesday," Trump wrote on Truth Social after U.S. markets closed, referring to the midterm elections held on 3 November. Nvidia dropped more than 9 percent and lost almost $450 billion in market value, and Qualcomm also fell more than 9 percent. Analysts attributed the fall to fears that Democrats would threaten the investment boom in artificial intelligence data centres, and Asian markets, with Seoul and Tokyo taking the brunt, sold off in early trade on Friday.
The argument that the election result drove the fall rests on how directly it touches the AI business. Data centres have faced broad opposition from U.S. voters regardless of political affiliation, and many midterm winners have pledged to put the brakes on such projects, which is the main reason analysts linked the selloff to the vote. NPR headlined its report with a $2 trillion rout in tech stocks and described it as driven by fears of an AI crackdown. The pressure on the industry is already visible, since on the same day OpenAI published commitments for future U.S. campuses, promising to pay the full cost of the electricity it uses and the grid infrastructure needed to serve it, to publish water and power use, and not to use non-disclosure agreements with public officials.
The argument that the election is only part of the story is that the market had other reasons to fall. CNBC reports that rising interest rates, heavy capital needs and fears that companies will carry too much debt and too little revenue added to the pressure, and that Qualcomm issued a disappointing earnings forecast for the current quarter, which helped to push it down by more than 9 percent. The opposition to data centres that analysts cite is bipartisan, according to AFP, which means it cannot be traced to one party's win. Nvidia's loss of almost $450 billion on a single day also suggests that investors were already holding very high valuations, so a political trigger may have exposed a weakness that was already there.
The selloff matters because the largest technology companies make up a big share of the major indices, and pension funds and household savings are invested in them. The size of AI spending also reaches beyond the United States. India is attracting large investments in AI infrastructure, with OpenAI partnering with Tata Group and TCS on capacity that starts at 100 MW and could scale to 1 GW, and Google planning a $15 billion investment in a gigawatt-scale hub in Visakhapatnam. A lasting retreat from data centres in the U.S. would affect how fast those projects move.
One day of losses does not settle whether the AI boom is ending, and Trump's explanation covers only part of what analysts describe. The next weeks of earnings and policy statements will show whether the fall was an overreaction or the first sign that the market is rethinking the cost of building AI.
