European far-right leaders quick to distance themselves from US president and stress their own priorities
The historic Republican defeat in the US midterm elections has forcibly reminded Europe’s far-right leaders of their perennial Donald Trump dilemma: they may love his nativist agenda, but the man himself is a toxic electoral liability.
Since his re-election in 2024, European populist leaders such as Marine Le Pen in France and Giorgia Meloni in Italy have carefully calibrated their public postures towards the US president, walking a delicate transatlantic tightrope.
Continue reading...Tuesday’s blue tsunami didn’t just boost the Democrats’ fortunes. The 2026 midterm results also fueled a surge in the stock market, with all but a few Big Tech stocks seeing notable gains.
But memory chip stocks told a different story. Shares in the four major memory chipmakers all saw steep declines. And those declines are continuing today. Here’s what you need to know.
The midterm results boosted the marketsYesterday was a stellar day for many of the biggest-name companies traded on the markets. And a stellar day for the markets in general. As CNN noted, the Dow had its best post-midterm-election day in 44 years, with a jump of about 3%, or 1,569 points.
The S&P 500 jumped 1.58%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq was up 1.44%.
When it comes to individual stocks, Big Tech (mostly) had a great day.
Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT) ended the day up 6.6%, Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) rose 5.3%, Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) jumped 6.1%, Netflix, Inc. (Nasdaq: NFLX) rose 4.6%, Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) was up 3.2%, and Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META) was up 1.4%.
As of the time of this writing, all those companies are continuing to see gains in premarket trading this morning, too.
The main reason for the stock market’s big day yesterday was the certainty brought by the Democrats’ decisive victory. There is no question about which party will hold the levers of power in Congress when its members are sworn in in January. Investors hate uncertainty, and the Democrats’ historic win all but eliminated it.
Memory chipmakers left out of the rallyDespite the broader gains, yesterday was not a good day for one type of company in particular: memory chipmakers.
Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) saw its stock sink 7%, SanDisk Corporation (Nasdaq: SNDK) fell 7.9%, Western Digital Corporation (Nasdaq: WDC) dropped 6.7%, and Seagate Technology Holdings plc(Nasdaq: STX) fell a staggering 8.1%.
And yes, the election results were likely to blame for those drops, too.
Unfortunately for investors in memory chip companies, yesterday’s massive drop in memory chip shares doesn’t seem to be a one-off. In premarket trading this morning, memory stocks are once again getting hammered, as of the time of this writing.
The main worry investors seem to have is that the midterm election results weren’t just a referendum on the Republican Party, which currently controls Congress, and the Trump administration.
Yes, Americans punished both for rising prices and an unpopular war, but another issue was also top of mind in many state and local elections: data centers.
Many of the Democrats who won those elections ran on an anti-AI and anti-data center stance, promising either moratoriums or restrictions on the building of the unpopular server farms that are popping up across the country.
And now many of those Democrats hold the levers of power not just in Washington, but also locally, where the data centers are being built.
Any reining in of the data center expansion is bad news for memory chipmakers.
Data centers need servers to run AI, and those servers need massive amounts of RAM. If data center buildouts slow, the demand for RAM shrinks at a commensurate rate. And that’s bad for memory chipmakers’ bottom lines.
Voters are unified in their opposition to data centersThere are few issues that both the left and right can agree on, but one of them is their dislike for data centers.
As noted by Reuters, an NBC and SSRS exit poll revealed that around 76% of voters opposed new data centers being built where they lived.
Those voters just sent a massive blue wave to Washington, and that doesn’t bode well for an increased data center buildout.
“Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” Elon Musk quipped, alluding to the opposition that terrestrial data centers now face.
Other billionaires were more foreboding.
As noted by CNBC, billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya warned that “the only way to sink the AI trade is to sink the data centers.”
Pershing Square founder Bill Ackman warned that slowing AI development could put America’s tech advantage in danger, declaring, “Practically speaking, we can’t slow down.”
Yet given the sinking stock prices of memory chip and storage makers, a slowdown is exactly what investors seem to think is coming.