Stocks of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each declined by approximately 5% on Friday, amid a $770 billion decrease in market cap for tech’s major players, following President Donald Trump’s warnings regarding heightened tariffs on Chinese imports.
As big tech firms control a growing proportion of the U.S. market, their losses caused the Nasdaq to fall by 3.6% and the S&P 500 by 2.7%. This marked the worst performance for both indexes since April, when Trump announced intentions to impose “reciprocal” tariffs on U.S. trading allies.
After the market closed on Friday, Trump stated in a social media update that the U.S. would enact a 100% tariff on China, and on November 1, it would introduce export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla experienced about a 2% decline in after-hours trading following this announcement.
The latest threats from the president are causing disruptions, at least temporarily, to what had previously been a continuous surge in tech, fueled by plans for hundreds of billions of dollars in artificial intelligence infrastructure investments.
In late September, Nvidia, the producer of graphics processing units for AI model training, became the first entity to achieve a market cap of $4.5 trillion. On Friday, Nvidia’s market valuation fell by about $229 billion.
OpenAI relies on Nvidia’s GPUs sourced from various cloud providers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is experiencing increasing demand.
In September, it launched the Sora 2 video creation application, and this week, the firm reported that the ChatGPT assistant now has over 800 million weekly users. Microsoft, investing heavily in infrastructure for its cloud data centers, saw its market cap decrease by $85 billion on Friday.
The market downturn erased Amazon’s annual gains. Currently, that stock is down 2% for 2025. Amazon competes with Microsoft for the rental of GPUs from its cloud infrastructure, experiencing a loss of $121 billion in market value over the day.
“There remains significant speculation regarding the effects tariffs will have on retail pricing and consumer behavior,” stated Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to analysts in July. “Much of the information thus far has been erroneous and misreported. As previously mentioned, it’s impossible to ascertain what the outcomes will be.”
Tesla, which unveiled more affordable models on Tuesday, witnessed a $71 billion decline in its market capitalization.
The automaker is set to announce third-quarter results on October 22, with Microsoft’s earnings planned for the following week and Nvidia’s results scheduled for November.
Google’s parent company Alphabet and Facebook’s parent company Meta dropped 2% and nearly 4%, respectively.
WATCH: President Trump: Analyzing significant tariff hikes on Chinese goods entering the U.S.
