What crashed the stock market Thursday and what happened next
The Nasdaq lost $2.3 trillion in a single session on November 5 after Democrats swept the midterms and investors bet that a new Congress will slow America's AI data-center boom. Here's what actually happened.
In brief
On Thursday, November 5, 2026, the U.S. stock market had one of its worst days in years. The Dow fell nearly 1,833 points. The Nasdaq entered correction territory. Roughly $2.3 trillion in market value vanished in a single session. The proximate cause was the 2026 midterm election results: Democrats swept both chambers of Congress and won a string of governor's races, and Wall Street's immediate reaction was to dump everything tied to artificial intelligence and data centers. By Friday morning, some of those losses were clawing back. But the two days together told a story about how fragile the AI trade had become, and how much of the stock market's 2026 gains rested on a single political assumption.
The numbers, plainly stated
The Nasdaq Composite declined 5.52% on Thursday to close at 24,315. The S&P 500 dropped 4.36% to end at 7,353.73, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 1,833 points, or 3.44%, settling at 51,523.06.
On the Nasdaq 100 specifically, the damage was even more concentrated: that index fell more than 6% and lost about $2.3 trillion, a record, while chip stocks fell 12.3% and Nvidia lost over $440 billion in market value.
The Nasdaq suffered its worst session since the tariff shock of April 2025, with AI chip stocks at the center of the selloff. Wall Street headed for its worst post-midterm day since 1896, according to one market tracker.
The S&P 500 dropped 4.36 percent, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 3.44 percent, and nearly $3 trillion was erased from the value of S&P 500 companies, according to Yahoo Finance.
What actually triggered it
The midterm results came in Tuesday, November 3. Democrats won the House, the Senate, and key governorships. Markets initially cheered: stocks rallied sharply on Wednesday. Then investors did the math overnight.
Wall Street suffered a sharp selloff on Thursday as concerns over tighter regulation of artificial intelligence infrastructure following Democratic election victories rattled investor confidence. Democratic wins in states where opposition to new data centers has gained momentum raised fears that policy changes could slow the massive AI infrastructure buildout that has fueled this year's stock market rally.
Democrats won both chambers of Congress in the November 3 midterm elections, and traders began pricing in a tougher policy backdrop for AI. Yassamin Ansari, a Democrat, called on November 4 for a pause on advanced AI development until adequate regulations are in place. For AMD and Nvidia, that rhetoric raised the prospect of slower data center buildouts just as both companies were ramping new systems.
The nationwide victories by Democrats raised the possibility that governments could force pauses in construction of more data centers. That is not a hypothetical concern in some states. Public opposition to data center siting has grown over electricity costs, water use, and local land-use fights, and several Democratic candidates ran explicitly on slowing or conditioning new construction.
Chip stocks took the worst of it
After a Democratic sweep of both chambers of Congress, which could spell more regulation of the AI buildout, stocks tied to the AI trade, particularly those linked to the chips industry and data centers, slid for a second consecutive day.
Nvidia sank about 9.26%, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged more than 12%. Broadcom fell 10% and Oracle moved lower by almost 7%.
AMD posted the biggest, most profitable quarter in its history, yet its stock was punished harder than any rival. Political risk outweighed strong earnings across the AI chip trade. AMD stock fell 13% in morning trading.
Nvidia fell 6.3% and was by far the heaviest weight on the S&P 500, a day after dropping 3.2%. CoreWeave, a company that rents access to AI chips to customers over the cloud, fell 10%.
Nvidia fell about 9.2% and lost more than $440 billion in value. The stock turned negative for 2026.
Big tech players dipping below their respective 200-day moving averages included Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Marvell Technology, Micron Technology, Sandisk, and Cisco.
Did the stock market actually 'crash'?
That word gets used loosely, and it matters here. A correction is a decline of 10% or more from a recent peak. A bear market is 20% or more. A crash typically implies a sudden, panic-driven plunge that breaks something structural. Thursday was bad, but it did not break anything.
The sell-off inflicted sharp one-day losses, particularly on technology companies, but the broader market remained far short of the threshold commonly used to define a bear market.
As of November 5, 2026, the Nasdaq 100 was 14.7 percent below its record and therefore in a correction; the S&P 500 was 5.9 percent below its record.
As bad as Thursday's stock market washout was, conditions had to get a lot worse before the New York Stock Exchange circuit breakers would kick in and pause trading. Those circuit breakers, which halt trading when the S&P 500 drops 7%, 13%, or 20% intraday, never came close to triggering.
The 2026 market rout erased trillions in value, but the S&P 500 remained well short of losses seen in previous major crashes. A sharp, technology-led stock market rout following the U.S. midterm elections wiped trillions of dollars from American companies, though its scale so far remained well short of the crashes that defined previous financial crises.
So: a severe single-day selloff and a Nasdaq correction, yes. A systemic crash in the 1929 or 2008 sense, no.
Why the AI trade was so exposed
The stock market's gains in 2025 and through most of 2026 were concentrated in a small number of companies. Nvidia, the chipmaker whose graphics processing units power nearly every major AI training cluster, became the second-largest company in the S&P 500 by total market value. That outsized weight had a mechanical effect.
A 1% move for Nvidia has more effect on the S&P 500 than almost every other U.S. stock because it is the second-largest company by total value. That allowed the drops for AI chip stocks to drown out gains for much of the rest of the S&P 500, where a slight majority of stocks actually rose on Thursday.
In other words: most stocks did not crash Thursday. The index crashed because a handful of very large technology and semiconductor companies collapsed together, all for the same political reason.
Investors sold AI infrastructure stocks on fears that a Democratic sweep in the midterms will slow data-center construction and the AI capital-spending cycle. That is distinct from fears about AI demand or the underlying technology. The assumption was not that AI would stop working. It was that the physical infrastructure needed to run it at scale, the data centers, the power contracts, the chip orders, would face new regulatory friction and slower permitting at the state and federal level.
The global spillover
Asian semiconductor stocks tumbled Thursday, as investors weighed the implications of a sweeping Democratic victory in the U.S. midterms.
Stock markets worldwide felt pressure from continued drops for companies in the artificial-intelligence industry, and South Korea's Kospi index tumbled 5.3%. Japan's Nikkei 225 also felt the sting of drops for tech and AI-related stocks, falling 1.8%.
South Korea's market reaction was especially sharp because companies like Samsung and SK Hynix supply memory chips to Nvidia and other U.S. AI hardware makers. Any slowdown in U.S. data center construction hits Asian component makers almost immediately.
Trump's response
President Donald Trump responded by blaming Americans for how they voted in the elections, posting on his Truth Social platform: "The Stock Market crashed today because the Dumocrats had a big Tuesday."
That framing was straightforward political messaging. The market had rallied strongly in 2025 and much of 2026 under a divided government, and Trump wanted to attribute the selloff to the election outcome rather than to the structural concentration in a single trade. Economists and market analysts pointed out that the selloff was specifically tied to AI regulation fears, not to any broad economic policy change that Democrats had announced.
Friday's partial recovery
The day after a historic selloff can go either way. Friday, November 6, went better than many expected.
U.S. stocks staged a partial recovery on November 6, with the Nasdaq Composite climbing 1.73% as Nvidia and other semiconductor companies rebounded following one of Wall Street's steepest technology selloffs in years.
Nvidia gained approximately 5.6%, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose 4.6% after losing more than 12% in the previous session.
An October jobs report landed at 8:30 a.m. and gave buyers extra confidence. Nonfarm payrolls rose by 165,000 versus the Dow Jones consensus of 59,000, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1% from 4.2% in the prior month. A labor market that strong pushed back against the idea that the economy was softening headed into a new political era.
Chip stocks led the recovery, with a gauge tracking major semiconductor companies jumping 6%, while the Nasdaq 100 gained 2%.
Some analysts cautioned it was too early to trust the rebound and declare Thursday the final washout. The underlying question, what a Democratic Congress will actually do about AI and data centers, remained entirely unanswered.
What Democrats have actually said about AI regulation
The market's reaction was driven by fear of what might happen, not by any specific bill that passed or executive order that was signed. Democrats as a party do not have a single unified position on AI data centers.
Some candidates who won on Tuesday ran on local objections to specific data center projects: noise, power grid strain, water consumption. Others have called for federal safety standards on AI model development. Yassamin Ansari called on November 4 for a pause on advanced AI development until adequate regulations are in place, which is a more sweeping position than most of her colleagues have endorsed publicly.
Investors feared that a Democratic sweep of both chambers of Congress as well as victories in key gubernatorial races could spell more regulation of the AI buildout across the country. Chip and AI infrastructure stocks fell again "including in some key data-center states, where public opposition to the industry's rapid expansion has been growing," Reuters reported.
The distinction matters for investors. State-level siting fights over individual data center projects are real and ongoing. A federal moratorium on AI development is a different category of action entirely, one that would face substantial legal and political obstacles even with Democratic majorities.
What to watch next
Several things will tell investors whether Thursday was a one-day panic or the beginning of a longer repricing of the AI trade.
The near-term outlook depends on three developments: whether semiconductor shares can sustain their recovery, whether Treasury yields stabilize following the employment report, and whether major technology companies maintain their AI investment plans.
Nvidia's next earnings report will be a flashpoint. So will any committee hearings in the new Congress on AI oversight. And the data center permitting fights already in progress in Virginia, Texas, Arizona, and Georgia will serve as early tests of whether Democratic governors and state legislatures actually move to slow construction, or whether the market's fears were overblown.
For everyday investors with index funds, the week's events are a reminder of how much concentration risk has quietly built up inside funds that look diversified. The S&P 500 is not, in practice, 500 equal companies. Five or six of them, all in the same technology sector, now account for a disproportionate share of the index's total weight. When those names move together, the whole index moves with them.
Nasdaq futures rebounded the morning after the tech-heavy index had its worst day in 19 months on post-election concerns about a data center buildout slowdown. As of Friday afternoon, Nvidia sat at roughly $197, still down sharply from its October peak but well off Thursday's low.
Rodriquez Wright II is founder and editor-in-chief of Washington DC Magazine and founder of Leo Operations. Photographer, filmmaker, strategist and recording artist. NABJ member.
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CAN I KICK IT? screens New Jack City at the Sylvan Theater, Washington Monument, on Aug. 22. (Courtesy SHAOLIN JAZZ)
The live-cinema series CAN I KICK IT? returns to the National Mall this month with what its producers are calling the "Gangsters on the Mall" chapter of their free outdoor summer run. On Saturday, August 22, the SHAOLIN JAZZ production brings the 1991 crime classic New Jack City to the Sylvan Theater at the Washington Monument for a night of film, music, and community under the DC summer sky.
What sets the event apart is the sound. As the film plays, DJ 2-Tone Jones builds an original score in real time, reimagining one of the most iconic crime movies of the ’90s through hip-hop, soul, funk, and more. It is less a movie screening than a live performance built around the film.
The details:
Film: New Jack City (1991), with a live soundtrack by DJ 2-Tone Jones
When: Saturday, August 22 — seating opens at 7:30 p.m. (bring lawn chairs and blankets); film begins at 8:30 p.m.
Where: Sylvan Theater at the Washington Monument, Independence Ave SW & 15th St NW
A parking note from the organizers: expect road closures and restricted parking east of 14th Street NW due to a separate race event in the District. Roads west of 14th Street NW will be accessible and available for parking.
New Jack City is the second of three screenings in this year’s free CAN I KICK IT? outdoor series, which opened with Black Panther at Skyland Town Center and concludes with Scarface at the Lincoln Memorial on September 5. Produced by the Washington, DC-based multimedia arts company SHAOLIN JAZZ, the series has presented more than 150 live cinematic experiences at venues across the country, from Lincoln Center to SXSW.
"I wanted to be able to tell good stories with substance and remove the ‘ego’ out of the art," said Andrew Huang during a recent interview. Now, he’s building his career at the intersection of discipline, creativity and innovation.
Andrew Huang, founder of New Place Studios. (Courtesy photo)
As a Chinese American, Huang was reared with a deep respect for hard work, consistency and excellence. He describes his childhood as "not so affluent" and later attended college to hone his passion for videography. "In college I tried to do something I loved, which was video, but along the way I knew that I had to find a job. And so I thought, ‘what was the low hanging fruit to get to that stable 9 to 5 job?,’" he stated.
Later in life, Huang found himself working for corporations where his creativity was often limited, eventually leading to burnout. "I worked in a corporation for a long time and there were a lot of missing pieces. I wanted to fill in gaps missing in corporate video production," said Huang.
He later described how his upbringing and a mindset of "survival" led him toward a corporate career. However, his desire for balance and authentic storytelling ultimately pushed him to take the entrepreneurial leap.
"I founded a new place where you can create video and film with ‘substance and style,’" said Huang. His desire for work-life balance and passion for storytelling naturally evolved into a small business based in Virginia. With the launch of New Place Studios, the entrepreneur quickly found himself reconnecting with the values that would become the foundation of everything he creates behind the camera.
Huang said being a business owner has allowed him to first embrace himself. While others may see video as simply capturing moments, he sees it as a way to preserve stories that inspire, connect and leave a lasting imprint.
By combining cinematic visuals with cutting-edge production techniques and a keen understanding of branding, Huang helps organizations and individuals communicate their vision with purpose. He said understanding a client’s "why" serves as the compass for delivering the services they need.
One benefit of working with a small business, he said, is that clients get to see the production process unfold through a micro lens while working with the same faces throughout the entire project. "The work feels personal," said Huang.
Huang does not regret leaving behind the flash-over-substance mentality and corporate hustle culture. That does not mean the Asian American entrepreneur has been without challenges in the industry. "It’s relatively hard to find other Asian American creatives or people who would want to work with me in the DMV," said Huang.
He identifies the industry culture in which everyone is trying to blend in, creatives may fear displaying their Asian identity and some feel pressure to adopt an American corporate persona. He also points to what he describes as a level of gatekeeping within the industry. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s 2024 statistics, Asian American and Pacific Islander entrepreneurs own more than 3 million businesses and employ 5.2 million people in the United States.
After tapping into organizations such as SCORE, which offers free small business mentorship, New Place Studios has become a trusted creative partner throughout the DMV (Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia). The company produces a range of creative services, including commercials, corporate branding, documentaries, film, 2D animation, motion graphics and photography.
For Huang, entrepreneurship has become more than a departure from corporate life. It has given him the freedom to create with intention, build meaningful connections and tell stories that go beyond the surface.
The 2026 CAN I KICK IT? outdoor series. Poster courtesy of SHAOLIN JAZZ.
For three Saturdays this summer, some of Washington’s most familiar public spaces will do something they rarely do after dark: fill up with blankets, lawn chairs, and the sound of a movie being scored live, in real time. CAN I KICK IT?, the traveling “live cinema” series produced by the DC-based multimedia arts company SHAOLIN JAZZ, is bringing a free outdoor run to the city — pairing three era-defining films with an original soundtrack performed on the spot by DJ 2-Tone Jones.
The premise is what sets it apart from a normal screening in the park. Rather than simply pressing play, 2-Tone Jones builds a score as the film unfolds, pulling from hip-hop, soul, funk, jazz, rock, electronic music, and sounds from around the world. The result, the organizers say, is less a movie night than a one-time performance — the same film you know, wired to a soundtrack you have never heard and will not hear again. Guest DJs warm up the crowd starting at 7:30 PM before each 8:30 PM screening.
The 2026 outdoor schedule
All three events are free and open to the public.
Saturday, August 8 — Black Panther at Skyland Town Center. A pop-up marketplace and community activities kick off the evening; guest DJs at 7:30 PM, film at 8:30 PM. Marvel’s superhero epic gets a one-night-only live score in Southeast DC.
Saturday, August 22 — New Jack City at the Sylvan Theater, Washington Monument. Seating begins at 7:30 PM; the film starts at 8:30 PM. The 1991 crime drama plays out at the foot of one of the country’s most recognizable landmarks.
Saturday, September 5 — Scarface at the Lincoln Memorial. Seating at 7:30 PM; film at 8:30 PM. The series closes with Brian De Palma’s crime saga against the backdrop of the Memorial, scored live from start to finish.
First up: Black Panther at Skyland Town Center on August 8. Poster courtesy of SHAOLIN JAZZ.
A DC company with a national footprint
SHAOLIN JAZZ describes itself as a Washington-based arts company working at the intersection of music, film, art, and culture, and CAN I KICK IT? is its signature production. According to the organizers, the series has staged more than 150 live cinematic experiences around the country — at performing arts centers, museums, festivals, and cultural institutions including Lincoln Center in New York, SXSW, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Republic Square in Austin, the Tacoma Armory, and The Cary Theater.
“CAN I KICK IT? has always been about creating a shared experience,” said Gerald Watson, co-founder of SHAOLIN JAZZ. “When you combine iconic films with live music in public spaces, something special happens. People aren’t just watching a movie — they’re experiencing it together. That’s what makes these nights so memorable.”
Cinema as a community event
The DC run lands as cities across the country look for new ways to activate public space through arts and culture — and this series is a straightforward pitch for how to do it: take a landmark everyone already knows, add a film everyone has an opinion about, and let a live soundtrack turn the evening into something neighbors experience shoulder to shoulder. Families, film buffs, and music fans are all invited, and admission won’t cost a thing.
The CAN I KICK IT? outdoor series runs August 8, August 22, and September 5. All events are free; check SHAOLIN JAZZ (shaolinjazz.com) for the latest details and any weather updates before heading out.
