Wall Street's AI trade broke on Thursday, one day after a post-election rally. The Nasdaq Composite fell about 3.9% and closed more than 10% below its October record, a correction. Micron and AMD each lost roughly 15%, Nvidia fell about 8%, and the semiconductor ETF SOXX dropped as much as 11%, its worst day since March 2020. The trigger was political: Democrats won both chambers and data centers were on ballots across the country. UBS estimates nearly a third of new US data-center capacity due in 2028 could be delayed. OpenAI responded with a pledge to pay full power costs at its own sites.
CVS Health said it will separate its retail pharmacy chain from its insurance and pharmacy benefit businesses, reversing a strategy built over a decade of acquisitions and unwinding the logic of its $78 billion purchase of Aetna in 2018. The split is expected to be completed in the first half of 2028. David Joyner will lead the insurance and benefits company, which keeps the CVS Health name for now, while Prem Shah becomes chief executive of the pharmacy business. Lawmakers from both parties have questioned whether owning drugstores, a benefit manager and an insurer lets one company steer patients and pricing.
DoorDash agreed to acquire grocery delivery company Instacart for about $17bn, paying $65.00 a share, a 26% premium to Instacart's closing price on October 22. The deal combines DoorDash's courier network with Instacart's grocery picking and fulfilment software, adds roughly 50,000 stores to Instacart's reach and merges DashPass with Instacart+ into a single membership. Instacart's board approved the transaction unanimously and DoorDash shares rose more than 9% in pre-market trading. The purchase follows DoorDash's acquisition of Deliveroo and continues a consolidation wave in a thin-margin delivery industry. Regulators are expected to examine overlapping market share in dense urban areas.
Anthropic has filed to go public in what could be the largest stock market debut on record, with reports pointing to a valuation of up to $2 trillion and a listing in mid-November. The Claude maker was valued at $965 billion in May after raising $65 billion, and its annualised revenue has climbed from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. The filing lands after a punishing month for technology shares, when Intel fell roughly 29% in a day, Alphabet lost about $500 billion in market value and the Nasdaq-100 shed close to $1.4 trillion in October. Investors are now asking whether AI spending can produce returns fast enough.
Binance says it will cover customer losses after an attacker moved about $6.36 billion out of its wallets across ten blockchains on 29 October, the largest crypto theft on record and roughly four times the Bybit hack of 2025. The exchange suspended withdrawals on several networks and later said around $3 billion had been located and frozen across exchanges, while Tether and Circle froze about $2.38 billion. Blockchain analytics firms have linked the attack to a North Korea-associated group. Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said the investigation had not yet identified the attackers.
Wall Street ended October with a sharp sell-off and a monthly loss for the two technology-heavy indexes. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 572 points, or 1.09%, to 51,770 on Friday, while the Nasdaq Composite dropped about 2.5% and the S&P 500 lost 1.3%. For the month the Dow gained 1.5%, but the Nasdaq fell 5.2%, its worst month since March 2025, and the S&P 500 slipped 1.2%. Intel posted its steepest one-day decline in more than four decades. Bitcoin also fell after Binance disclosed a $6.3 billion hack, the largest theft of its kind.
Alphabet's market value fell by about $500bn after the company revealed that its AI-generated search summaries were affecting advertising revenue. Google shares hit a six-month low, spooking investors who had priced in steady growth from search ads. The drop came as United States technology stocks fell sharply, with AI-related spending across the industry approaching $1tn and Intel shares continuing to slide. The Nasdaq opened at its lowest level in more than two months. The sell-off reflects growing doubt about how quickly AI infrastructure spending will turn into profit.
Microsoft and Alphabet both reported strong cloud growth for the latest quarter, but investors reacted in opposite directions to the cost of building AI infrastructure. Microsoft posted fiscal first-quarter revenue of $92.3 billion, up 19 percent, with Azure growing 48 percent and Microsoft Cloud at $63.9 billion. Capital spending reached $39.4 billion, below the roughly $50 billion analysts expected, and management guided full-year capital expenditure to about $175 billion. Alphabet reported revenue of $127.6 billion, up 25 percent, with Google Cloud up 103 percent to $30.7 billion and capital spending of $51.4 billion, yet its shares fell as software and cybersecurity stocks sank.
Brent crude traded near $114 a barrel on Wednesday after touching above $117 twice in the past week, the highest level since April. Prices are up about 77 percent on the year as Iranian attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz keep a war premium in the market. October has been the worst month for attacks on shipping in and around the strait since tracking began in 2017. The waterway carried about a fifth of world energy supplies before the conflict began in February. Hints of renewed talks pulled a few dollars out of the price, and Russia is raising diesel output under new export quotas.
Consumer goods companies told investors this week that commodity and fuel costs linked to the war with Iran will keep pushing prices up into next year. Procter & Gamble put the hit at about $1 billion and guided to flat-to-3% adjusted earnings growth, after reporting quarterly core earnings of $2 a share against estimates of $1.88 and net profit of $3.04 billion. Unilever said it will raise prices again, and Nestle has issued similar warnings. US consumer prices show the pattern: energy costs are up 20.4% over twelve months and gasoline 34.2%, with freight, packaging and fertiliser adding to the bill for food and household goods.