Buckle up, folks—Big Tech just took a brutal nosedive, with the Nasdaq getting hammered as consumer confidence craters and AI spending jitters shake Wall Street.
This week saw U.S. tech stocks suffer their worst performance since April, with nearly $1 trillion in market value wiped out from industry giants, consumer sentiment hitting a three-year low, and investor panic over AI investments colliding with a record-breaking government shutdown, the New York Post reported.
Early in the week, the tech sell-off kicked off after Palantir dropped its earnings report on Tuesday, beating expectations but sparking doubts about its valuation.
Analysts raised eyebrows, and a notable investor’s short position didn’t help, sending Palantir’s stock tumbling over 13% for the week despite a slight Friday recovery.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp fired back, calling short selling “market manipulation,” but the damage was done, and the ripple effect hit hard across the sector.
Tech giants like Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, and Meta shed a staggering $1 trillion in combined value, with AMD, Nvidia, and Oracle each dropping around 10%.
Meta slid 6% and Microsoft dipped 5%, proving even the biggest players aren’t immune to this market shakeup.
Meanwhile, consumer sentiment sank to its lowest level in over three years, with the University of Michigan’s reading dropping to 50.3, down 6.2% for the month.
That’s nearly 30% lower than last year, and Americans are feeling the pinch on everything from coffee to furniture.
Joanne Hsu, director of the University of Michigan survey, told Bloomberg, “Consumers perceive pressure on their personal finances from multiple directions.”
She added, “Consumers also anticipate that labor markets will continue to weaken in the future and expect to be personally affected.” When folks are this worried, it’s not just numbers—it’s a signal that big-government solutions and progressive spending aren’t easing the burden.
Adding to the chaos, investors are growing uneasy about massive AI investments, with some whispering about a dot-com-style bubble ready to pop.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the Financial Times that China might “win the AI race,” spooking markets, though he later claimed China is just “nanoseconds behind America.” Nice try, but that flip-flop didn’t exactly inspire confidence when billions are at stake.
By Friday, the Nasdaq was down 0.2%, capping a 3% weekly loss—the steepest since April’s tariff-driven tumble—while the Dow Jones gained 75 points and the S&P 500 inched up 0.1%.
On top of it all, the U.S. government shutdown hit a record 38 days on Friday, piling uncertainty onto an already jittery market. While Alphabet and Apple dodged the worst, the broader tech sector’s pain—like Super Micro Computer’s 25% plunge—shows that government paralysis and unchecked tech spending aren’t the “innovative” fixes some on the left tout; they’re a mess waiting to implode.
