Artificial intelligence is accelerating the cooling of the U.S. job market, coupled with misunderstandings such as AI companies seeking U.S. government "guarantees," leading to declines in the three major U.S. stock indices.
On November 7th local time, the Nasdaq Index fell by 1.9%, the S&P 500 Index dropped by 1.12%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined by 0.84%. Among individual stocks, Tesla's share price fell over 3%, but it saw some recovery in after-hours trading after Tesla shareholders approved CEO Elon Musk's $1 trillion compensation package.
Major U.S. tech stocks experienced widespread declines. Both Nvidia and Tesla fell over 3%, while Intel, Amazon, and Meta dropped over 2%. Microsoft fell over 1%, and Netflix and Apple also saw slight decreases. It is understood that Microsoft's stock has fallen for seven consecutive trading days, marking the longest losing streak since 2022.
On the news front, the U.S. job market is deteriorating. Latest data from U.S. employment consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas shows that as AI reshapes various industries and companies accelerate cost-cutting, U.S. businesses announced 153,000 job cuts in October, setting a new record for October layoffs since 2003. Layoffs increased 175% year-over-year and 183% month-over-month. By the end of October 2025, U.S. companies had announced over 1.099 million job cuts year-to-date, a 65% increase year-over-year, setting a new record since 2020.
Additionally, on Wednesday local time, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar stated that the company seeks to build an ecosystem involving private equity funds, banks, and federal government "backstopping" or "guarantees" to help the company raise funds. This statement sparked misunderstandings that "AI giants need U.S. government guarantees."
On Thursday local time, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman posted a lengthy response clarifying that OpenAI is not seeking government guarantees for its data centers. He explained that the CFO meant the U.S. government should establish a "National Strategic Compute Reserve" to procure computing power, but it should not benefit any specific company.
Popular Chinese concept stocks were mixed, with the Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index down 0.03%. Among them, XPeng Motors rose over 9%. This followed doubts raised by XPeng's newly developed humanoid robot IRON walking catwalk on stage, with some questioning if "a person was hiding inside the robot." XPeng founder He Xiaopeng conducted a live broadcast where staff cut open IRON's outer suit and muscles on site, dispelling the rumor.
ECARX rose over 10%, Shengda Technology and Baidu rose over 3%, Alibaba and Zeekr rose over 1%, while BOSS Zhipin and Li Auto saw slight gains. Pony.ai fell over 8%, Zai Lab fell over 6%, Kingsoft Cloud and Miniso fell over 3%, NIO and CHAGEE fell over 1%, and Ctrip and Tencent Music saw slight declines.
