The AI selloff turned into a rout on Thursday. The Nasdaq 100 plunged 6.36%, its worst day since March 2020, and the S&P 500 fell 4.36%.
The index’s heavyweights lost more than $2 trillion in market value in a single session. Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) alone shed about $447 billion as its shares sank 9.3%.
Memory chipmakers fell even harder. Micron Technology Inc. (NASDAQ:MU) tumbled 17.5%, wiping out roughly $157 billion, while SanDisk Corp. (NASDAQ:SNDK) plunged 22.3%. Both remain among this year’s biggest winners, with Micron still up 122% and SanDisk up 230% in 2026.
The trigger came from Texas. There, Democrat Gina Hinojosa unseated Gov. Greg Abbott after pledging an immediate moratorium on new data centers. According to Wells Fargo, the state accounts for 27% of planned U.S. data center gigawatts.
The credit market reacted on Thursday too, but far more calmly.
“In terms of the market impact, so far it’s been relatively limited,” Gavan Nolan, executive director and co-head of fixed income pricing research at S&P Global Market Intelligence, told Benzinga on Thursday.
According to S&P Global Market Intelligence data, the CDX North America Investment Grade index widened to 62 basis points on Thursday from 59.
That only takes it back to where it stood on Tuesday, before the post-election tightening.
CoreWeave Was Under Pressure Before the Vote
The investment-grade widening has been building for months.
Since mid-April, five-year credit default swaps on Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) have nearly doubled to 100 basis points. Over the same period, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) swaps went from 47 to 92.
The real stress sits lower down the credit spectrum.
Nolan described CoreWeave Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWV) as one of the more liquid single-name high-yield CDS in North America. Its contract jumped to 23 points upfront on Thursday from 20, the convention used for distressed names. In mid-April it was 2 points.
“It was under pressure before the midterms. So I don’t think the midterms were the reason, because it was already happening,” he said.
Part of the problem is CoreWeave’s capital structure. Its CDS reference senior unsecured debt. Meanwhile, the company has also borrowed through leveraged loans, asset-backed deals and private credit, and those loans rank ahead of the bonds.
As a result, investors are demanding much more compensation for the risk of not getting their money back.
“The neocloud sector is clearly at the moment the pressure point,” Nolan said.
Hyperscalers, by contrast, fund much of their spending with operating cash flow and remain strong credits, he said. CoreWeave, instead, is a pure AI play with a concentrated customer base.
A Capex Slowdown Could Help Bondholders
Nolan said a slower buildout would not necessarily hurt credit.
“If there was a slowdown, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing from a credit perspective,” he said.
According to Nolan, the heavy supply of hyperscaler bonds has been hard for investors to digest, which partly explains the widening. Still, he is not making a call on whether a slowdown will come.
“I don’t know if that’s going to happen. We have to wait and see,” Nolan said.
SpaceX Has Almost Caught Up With Oracle
Oracle Corp. (NYSE:ORCL) is still rated triple-B. Its five-year CDS, however, widened to 305 basis points on Thursday, up from 174 in mid-April.
Nolan said that level is typical of credits rated between double-B and single-B.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be downgraded below triple-B,” he said.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) moved even faster. Its CDS jumped 26 basis points on Thursday to 296, just 9 basis points short of Oracle. A few weeks ago, Oracle stood out on its own.
“Again it’s a triple-B rated name, but it’s trading at levels more consistent with high yield,” Nolan said.
SpaceX shares fell 9% on Thursday, while Oracle lost 6.9%.
Meanwhile, the iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (NYSE:HYG) slipped just 0.3%. Stocks are pricing a broken AI buildout. Credit, for now, is pricing stress concentrated in the borrowers that depend most on outside capital.
