The seven sisters of the U.S. stock market evaporated about 1.04 trillion U.S. dollars in a single day, and the cloud giants experienced negative cash flow

After the U.S. midterm elections, concerns about tightening AI regulations and slowing data center construction have intensified, leading to a significant sell-off in U.S. tech stocks. On November 5, the "Seven Sisters" of U.S. stocks lost approximately $1.04 trillion in market value in a single day, with Nvidia dropping 9.26%, resulting in a loss of over $440 billion in market value, which is 2 to 4 times the decline of core clients like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.

The financial pressure on AI infrastructure investment is increasing. In the third quarter of this year, the combined operating cash flow of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta was no longer sufficient to cover fixed asset expenditures, with a funding gap of about $26.4 billion, whereas a year ago, the four companies still had a cash flow surplus of about $61.7 billion. Amazon's free cash flow turned from $14.8 billion in the past 12 months to a net outflow of $42.4 billion, while Meta's free cash flow turned negative for the first time in over a decade, and Google's long-term debt increased from about $20 billion to $125 billion.

On Election Day, out of 41 local propositions related to data centers in 10 U.S. states, 40 of the voting results leaned towards restricting development, with 27 restrictive or oppositional propositions being passed. Research firm SemiAnalysis predicts that the impact of related policy changes on projects already underway by 2027 will be limited, but it may affect computing power expansion plans for 2028 and beyond. More than 90% of Nvidia's revenue comes from data center business; during the same period, Google Cloud's operating profit in the third quarter reached three times that of the same period last year, AWS's operating profit increased from $11.4 billion to $17.8 billion, and Microsoft Azure's revenue grew by 48%.