美国中期选举引发科技股震荡，AI资本开支预期重估

This week's midterm elections ushered in not just a democratic majority in congress, but a wild and historic swing in the markets driven by uncertainty over trillions of dollars in AI spending. That's right. The Nasdaq recovered some on Friday after dropping more than 5% the day before. Thursday saw the worst day in more than a year for all three major stock indices. Joining us now, Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director for Yorkville Ives and Company, and Bloomberg's own US equities reporter, Natalia Kniazhevich.

Natalia, since you did come in on set on Saturday, and we appreciate We're gonna start with you. Just what... Why... How did this happen? So it's been going like this. You know, we saw a rally and then a dip and then a recovery. What was driving this? Yeah. So I think the setup for these elections was really challenging already. We saw wild swings during the earnings season. People are concerned about the CapEx for some of the biggest tech companies.

However, we saw that hedge funds cut exposure to US stocks pretty significantly. When I spoke to sources and asked, like, what do you guys expect? For many of them, the election was a kind of clearing event for the stock market, which means that no more uncertainty. No matter who wins, it's gonna be a rally. I spoke with major Wall Street trading desks. They really encouraged clients to buy stocks ahead of The US press...

Midterm elections. And then we saw this rally on the Thursday. The next day, the market woke up and decided that, actually, it's not gonna be good for The US stocks anymore. So completely, it's a big reversal. So we saw the Nasdaq plunged by the most in the pandemic. The volatility index spike. I just saw prime brokerage data from Goldman Sachs, and it showed that hedge funds sold US tax stocks by the most ever. Wow.

Wow. It's it's really a week of superlatives. A week of superlatives. Dan, I wanna get your perspective on sort of what you watched unfold and how you navigated this, gripping the desk, wondering what was gonna happen, or did you think too this was something that was gonna maybe short lived? An an alarm here, but but nothing that was gonna have lasting significance. Look. I think it's the blue tidal wave that was really the gut punch to tech investors because of the anti AI data center push.

I think Natalia, what she's talking about in terms of going through the timeline, I think it's very accurate. But I think what started to happen is the next day, the political, you know, sort of talk in DC on social media was extremely anti data center. And and I think as that sort of bubbled up, you saw that have a major impact on these stocks because the... Look. Our view right now, CapEx for big tech that was gonna peak probably 28, 29 peaks next year.

So the stocks reflect some of that, but I think where the... Where this got over its skis is that this sell off is almost treating AI like it's done. Like, it's not gonna happen. Like, Google is just gonna go back to search in a second. Because the technology is coming. Right? And the and the reality is it's 3 to 4,000,000,000,000 that's gonna be spent. It's just gonna be more elongated, and, ultimately, the peak comes earlier.

And that's what these stocks are reflecting in terms of the blue tidal wave, especially in Texas where 30% of data centers are gonna get billed. Dan, I was talking to, because this is New York, a couple people in my building yesterday where everyone was talking about this in the lobby. A lot of them are investors. A lot of them are in finance. And I was wondering how they were feeling about the AI spend, about AI investment.

And they were all very dismissive of what we just saw in the election. They said they think this is a blip. They think this was pandering to voters, and they don't think policy at the end will really change, and then it will be eventually business as usual. That surprised me, but especially in light of how the markets reacted. Where is the disconnect there? I think part of it is that investors have become sort of skeptical of politicians, and I mean, enough.

Yeah. And and and for good re... You could dismiss it. A lot of this comes down to Texas and the governor. I mean, let's just call it it is. Like, that's that's also why I think it was very important that she came out talking about the data center piece that she's not necessarily anti data center. It's that big tech companies need to come to the table, but let's just call it like it is. Big tech has created this PR black eye.

Because if you tell the American population we're gonna cut 50% of white collar jobs and your electricity bill is gonna go higher, they're not gonna have balloons and cake ready for the data center. And I think that's that... That's gonna be a a new narrative now. These big tech companies gonna... Whether it's tax revenues, putting jobs where data centers are, It is a new game in that way. Yeah. I feel like crisis comms firms are gonna be very busy in the next couple of layer onto that, I assume, the the amount of money that they spent on these elections as well, which I think there's been some blowback against too.

Natalia Dan was talking about how there is this... Maybe this expectation here or sense that maybe this was the the end of AI. He intimating as many people have here. That's certainly not the case in light of sort of how much money and development has gone into all of this. What have your sources told you just about where this goes from here? So we had, again, a really wild swing over the course of a couple of days here.

Is this going to be a process of digestion that plays out over the next few weeks or months? What are they thinking about the kind of the prospects going forward? Yeah. I think it's also important to look at positioning because that sell off was mainly driven by the so called technical factors. We have a huge universe called systematic funds. So whenever the market declines, they accelerate selling. So now when we look at positioning right now So is it like an automatic trigger for some of the sales?

Okay. Discretionary investors, they humans, and then we have robots. So they don't care about fundamentals. They just follow the stock market direction. Okay. And it's really important because when they sell, it accelerates the move. And even Thursday was not maybe as bad from the fundamental perspective, but it was bad from the technical perspective. Now many of those funds have reduced exposure significantly. And investors I spoke with, they say this is really important because now they have more dry powder or money to deploy, so maybe we will see short term rally.

But, again, looking at fundamentals, the whole AI trade has become more diverse, segmented, and it's gonna look... We will look at earnings, of course, CapEx growth, and winners and losers from here. Dan, we also saw chip stocks get hit especially hard. The stocks is down 12%. Why are they feeling this so acutely? Yeah. It's the worry that the data centers going into 2029, are are there gonna be data centers to put in there in terms of the chips?

I think, like, the the sell off in chips got way overdone, especially AMD, NVIDIA, and others. I I think as Natalia was talking about, you need to parse out who is on the wrong side of this. Jeep... If you think about capacity and you need make gigawatts today, whoever has it is... They're at the top of the mountain. That's the hyperscalers. Chip companies, obviously, the orders today, it's still, call it, 12 to one.

So that's gonna continue to play out in terms of the growth numbers. Neo Clouds, they're clearly on the wrong side of this. There's gonna be Game of Thrones. Some will be left on the wrong side of this. And I think that's what investors are doing. They're trying to separate out. But, look, in terms of the semi sell off, they're almost treating these tech stocks like the blue wave has ended AI. And that's just wrong because the reality is,