The Nasdaq is sliding, and more than a few people on Wall Street are asking what went wrong, given that everything seemed settled after the midterm elections.
On Wednesday, November 4, 2026, tech indexes had the air of a celebration. Today, November 6, 2026, the mood has flipped. Behind the turn are two issues that rarely make the evening news but that could weigh heavily on portfolios in the months ahead.
Politics moves into the data centers
The midterm elections handed the Democratic Party full control of Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Markets initially welcomed the result, relieved that the electoral uncertainty was over. Then institutional investors began reckoning with the practical consequences of the new balance of power, and the selling concentrated on everything connected to artificial intelligence.
At the center of the issue are the large data-processing campuses that became a hot local topic during the campaign. They consume enormous amounts of electricity and water to cool their servers, and many voters blame them for driving up household utility bills.
With the newly elected officials, the risk that data center construction slows down has become concrete. In Texas, which thanks to tax incentives and available land had been the promised land of hyperscale infrastructure, new governor Gina Hinojosa has confirmed that she wants to impose an immediate statewide moratorium on new facilities. Amy Acton’s proposal in Ohio is more nuanced: it would authorize new plants only if tech companies committed by contract to pay 100% of the costs of upgrading the public power grid.
Washington’s new majority could move as well, opening antitrust investigations into energy access and the concentration of computing capacity in the hands of Big Tech.
Investors drew a simple conclusion. Between red tape, environmental constraints and grid connection costs, new server farms risk coming online later than expected, and semiconductor orders and advanced rack systems could slip by a few quarters along with them.
Cracks in the semiconductor sector
The political pressure landed on a sector that was already showing signs of fatigue, and the spark was Qualcomm’s quarterly report, along with revised outlooks from other big hardware names. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index lost nearly 6%, with selling cascading across memory makers, graphics processor designers and smartphone chip specialists.
The Qualcomm problem
Paradoxically, Qualcomm’s fiscal fourth-quarter 2026 numbers were good, with revenue of $10.32 billion and adjusted earnings per share of $2.17, above estimates.
What alarmed the market was the guidance. For fiscal first-quarter 2027, Qualcomm expects earnings per share between $2.15 and $2.35, and the midpoint of $2.25 sits below the $2.32 analysts were expecting, enough to overshadow a quarter that beat expectations.
Management also flagged rising costs across the entire supply chain, from silicon wafer prices to advanced packaging bottlenecks to memory, and it is not clear the company can pass them on to customers in full.
Also weighing are a 26% year-over-year drop in smartphone segment volumes and the gradual wind-down of supply to Apple, both of which cast doubt on the pricing power the market had been counting on, meaning chipmakers’ ability to raise prices at will.
The selling spread to Asia as well, and in South Korea the KOSPI lost more than 5%, dragged down by SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics.
The takeaway for anyone holding tech stocks
Politics is casting doubt on future demand, chip costs are eating into today’s margins, and when those two things hit a sector priced as though nothing could go wrong, the reaction turns violent and the rush to lock in gains begins.
Whether this is the start of a long bear phase or a correction after months of euphoria, nobody knows right now.
Anyone holding AI-linked stocks or funds heavily exposed to the Nasdaq can use the moment to calmly ask how much risk they are really running, and whether they still know what they own and why.
Editor’s note
This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Tommaso Scarpellini on November 06, 2026 as «Dalle moratorie sui data center alla guidance di Qualcomm, cosa c’è dietro la frenata del Nasdaq?». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.
