Many people attribute Thursday’s crash to “deleveraging after a big rally,” but the trigger was actually very specific: expectations for AI regulation were repriced overnight after the midterm elections.

Democrats won both the House and the Senate, and the market immediately began pricing in four types of tightening: restrictions on data center expansion, requiring data centers to fully cover the costs of connecting to the power grid, taxes on AI services, and preservation of state-level regulatory authority. Texas is especially important—it has more planned data center projects than any other state, and the newly elected Democratic governor explicitly said approvals for new projects should remain paused until the state legislature passes “real protections.” This isn’t sentiment; the most critical assumption in cash flow models has changed.

That’s why this downturn is fundamentally different from purely technical deleveraging: once deleveraging is over, it’s over, but policy uncertainty won’t be resolved in a day. What worries me most is that if the slowdown in data center approvals shifts from “expectation” to “reality,” chip stocks will face not valuation compression, but a downward revision to end-demand expectations. Until this variable plays out, I’ll be very cautious about buying the dip in chip stocks.

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