Nvidia's stock has now fallen for a fifth straight week, with nearly $1.4 trillion in market value erased since the shares hit an all-time high in October. On Thursday alone, the stock tumbled more than 9%, wiping out close to $450 billion in market value—the steepest single-day decline since the DeepSeek selloff in January 2025. Over the same stretch, shares of several semiconductor companies fell sharply, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index posted its biggest one-day drop since March 2020. Nvidia now trades about 24% below its record closing price on October 6 and has slipped beneath its 200-day moving average.

The trigger for this selloff points to a shift in U.S. politics: Democrats control both chambers of Congress, and candidates from both parties have come out against AI data centers that rely on Nvidia chips. The Senate recently came close to passing a bill that would require data centers to shoulder more of their own electricity costs. Since Nvidia went public in 1999, the stock has suffered declines of five consecutive weeks or more only 12 times, with the longest losing streak lasting seven weeks in the summer of 2008. After past losing streaks, the odds of the stock rising within 13 weeks were not high, though it mostly climbed after a full year; there was also an extreme case in 2002, when market value shrank by nearly two-thirds within a year of a losing streak. Congress may now hold hearings and launch investigations into matters related to AI data centers—a new risk hanging over Nvidia's stock.