Shares of Amazon, Nvidia, and Tesla each fell about 5% on Friday, erasing roughly $770 billion in market value from tech’s biggest names after President Donald Trump threatened to impose new tariffs on Chinese goods.
The slump hit hard across Wall Street. With trillion-dollar tech firms now dominating the U.S. stock market, their slide dragged the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7% — the steepest single-day declines since April, when Trump first pledged “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After markets closed, Trump intensified his rhetoric. In a post on social media, he said the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China, adding that export controls on “any and all critical software” would take effect on Nov. 1. In extended trading, Amazon, Nvidia, and Tesla each slipped another 2%.
The latest escalation briefly halted what had been a months-long rally in the tech sector, fueled by hundreds of billions of dollars in planned artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure spending.
In late September, Nvidia — whose graphics processing units power AI model training — became the first company to hit a $4.5 trillion market capitalization. On Friday, it lost nearly $229 billion in value. Nvidia’s chips underpin much of the AI ecosystem, supplying companies like OpenAI, which sources GPUs through Microsoft’s cloud services.
Demand for AI tools remains high. OpenAI introduced its Sora 2 video generation app in September, and this week announced that ChatGPT now has over 800 million weekly users. But even Microsoft wasn’t immune to the sell-off. Its market value sank by $85 billion on Friday, as investors reassessed how export restrictions could disrupt cloud and chip supply chains.
The losses were equally sharp elsewhere. Amazon’s stock drop erased its gains for the year, leaving it down 2% in 2025 after shedding $121 billion in value. The company, which competes with Microsoft in renting AI chips from its cloud data centers, has been vocal about the uncertainty tariffs bring.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Meanwhile, Tesla, which unveiled new lower-priced electric vehicles earlier in the week, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion. The automaker reports its third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings following a week later. Nvidia will report in November.
Other major tech firms joined the decline. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, fell 2%, while Meta, Facebook’s owner, lost nearly 4%.
For a sector that’s powered much of the market’s momentum this year, Friday’s sell-off underscored just how fragile the rally remains — one presidential post away from unraveling billions.