TLDR
- Nvidia closed Thursday at $181.60, down 9.26%, its worst day since the DeepSeek sell-off.
- The drop erased nearly $450 billion in a day and is on track for a fifth straight losing week.
- Democrats won both chambers of Congress, and data center power costs are a political target.
- The PHLX Semiconductor Index had its worst day since March 2020.
- Nvidia reports quarterly results on Nov. 17.
Nvidia (NVDA) stock closed at $181.60 on Thursday, down 9.26%. It was the stock’s worst day since the DeepSeek sell-off in January 2025.
The drop cut nearly $450 billion from its market value in one session. That left the company worth about $4.4 trillion.
Early Friday, the stock was bouncing, up about 4% to $188.79 in pre-market trading. Thursday’s close was about 24% below its Oct. 6 record close and under its 200-day moving average of $204.48.
Nvidia is on track for a fifth straight losing week. The slide since the October record has erased nearly $1.4 trillion in market value.
Washington Takes Center Stage
Democrats won both chambers of Congress this week. Candidates in both parties also campaigned against AI data centers, which run on Nvidia’s chips.
The Senate came close this fall to passing a bill that would make data centers pay more of the power costs they create. “There will be congressional hearings,” Stifel’s Brian Gardner told Reuters ahead of the vote. “There will be investigations.”
UBS estimates that construction delays could hit a large part of the U.S. data center capacity planned for 2028. That is a key source of future chip demand.
China headlines added to the pressure. House Republican leaders asked for a closed-door briefing with Jensen Huang after a report about an executive’s alleged links to Chinese intelligence.
Chinese AI firm Moonshot has also explored getting Blackwell chips through European data centers.
The pain was not limited to Nvidia. Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor fell more than 10%, while AMD, Micron and Arm posted steep double-digit losses.
The PHLX Semiconductor Index had its worst day since March 2020. It sits more than a third below its June record, and Sandisk dropped 22%.
A Rare Losing Streak
Since its 1999 IPO, Nvidia has strung together five or more down weeks 12 times before this one. The longest ran seven weeks in the summer of 2008.
The most recent streak ended in October 2022, about a month before ChatGPT launched. The stock roughly quadrupled over the following year.
History is mixed, though. Nvidia was higher 13 weeks later in only five of the 12 earlier streaks, though it was up a year later in eight.
The worst case came in 2002, when the stock lost nearly two-thirds of its value over the following year.
Insiders have been sellers. They sold about $399.5 million of the stock over the past 90 days, including a $144 million sale by director Mark Stevens on Sept. 4 at $231.62.
Analysts remain upbeat. MarketBeat data shows five Strong Buy ratings, 48 Buy ratings and one Hold, with an average price target of $318.85.
Ark Invest reportedly bought Nvidia while selling AMD. Box also expanded its partnership with Nvidia to bring Nemotron into new AI search tools.
Last quarter, Nvidia earned $2.22 per share on $96.22 billion in revenue, beating estimates of $2.09 and $92.27 billion. The board also approved a $150 billion buyback on Sept. 28.
Next up is the Nov. 17 quarterly report.
