Analysis
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 630 points, or 1.2%, on Wednesday as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since 2023, with the S&P 500 slipping 0.5% and the Nasdaq Composite closing roughly flat, according to TheStreet and Yahoo Finance. Financial-services stocks led the decline, a sector whose earnings are especially sensitive to the path of rates.
The Setup And The Reversal
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's committee signaled at least one additional hike before year-end in its updated projections, a more hawkish message than some investors had priced in. But by Thursday morning, futures pointed to a rebound -- Dow futures up 374 points (0.7%), S&P 500 futures up 0.8%, and Nasdaq-100 futures up 1% -- suggesting Wednesday's selloff was, at least initially, a reflexive reaction rather than a durable repricing of risk assets.
“This was not the only jolt AI-adjacent equities absorbed this week.”
A Week Of Two Separate AI Shocks
This was not the only jolt AI-adjacent equities absorbed this week. Chip and data-center-linked stocks separately sold off on Monday after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's essay calling for a coordinated AI development slowdown, cosigned publicly by OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and xAI's Elon Musk, rattled confidence in the near-term AI capex trade. Not every chip name moved in the same direction, though: Semtech rallied more than 11% Tuesday on a strong earnings beat, and AMD gained nearly 5% after reiterating its AI demand outlook at an industry conference -- evidence the selloff was sentiment-driven rather than a uniform repricing of AI infrastructure fundamentals.
Why The Split Matters
- Rate-sensitive financials -- led Wednesday's Dow decline, the most textbook reaction to a hike: higher rates compress net-interest-margin assumptions and raise funding costs across the sector.
- AI infrastructure and chip names -- whipsawed by two distinct narratives in one week (an AI-slowdown essay Monday, a rate hike Wednesday), making it hard to attribute any single day's move to one cause.
- Growth-stage tech broadly -- theoretically the most exposed to higher discount rates on long-duration earnings, yet the Nasdaq's flat Wednesday close suggests the market had already partially absorbed the hike's likelihood ahead of the announcement.
What To Watch
A single volatile week is not enough to confirm whether the market believes higher-for-longer rates meaningfully threaten AI-sector valuations, or whether this was standard post-FOMC noise that resolves within days. The clearest tell will be whether financial-services names continue underperforming tech into the following week -- that split would indicate investors are pricing a genuine rates story specific to bank earnings, rather than a broader risk-off rotation out of growth equities. Thursday's futures strength argues for the latter, more benign read, but futures markets have reversed course within a single session before.