Pulse News

**Trump’s Stock Sell-Off; Coreweave's IPO Filing**

By Martin Peers

Mar 3, 2025, 5:00pm PST

This year is really turning into a dud for tech stocks. Monday's big market sell-off slammed the tech sector across the board, particularly chip companies like Nvidia and Broadcom that have wide exposure to China. That made it a somewhat inauspicious day for CoreWeave, a young cloud company operating data centers for artificial intelligence firms, to release paperwork for its planned public debut.

CoreWeave's IPO is much anticipated, as it will give investors another avenue for exposure to AI. And on some metrics, CoreWeave looks to be going gangbusters. As my colleague Cory Weinberg scooped on Sunday, the IPO filing showed that CoreWeave's revenue skyrocketed by eight times to $1.9 billion. The only fly in the ointment is that Microsoft accounted for 62% of that revenue, a concentration of risk that surely won't thrill investors. After all, Microsoft is a competitor as well as a customer of CoreWeave. A shortage of AI data center capacity makes CoreWeave valuable for Microsoft right now, but given how many data centers are under development, that may not always be the case. It also may not help that the founders have cashed out nearly $500 million worth of stock already, as Cory reported tonight.

Whatever investors make of the company, its IPO prospects likely rest in part on the state of the market. Monday's drop—the S&P 500 fell 1.7%—appeared driven by investors realizing that President Donald Trump's threats of additional tariffs against China and new levies on Canada and Mexico are likely to become a reality as of Tuesday.

Of the group of tech companies with at least a trillion-dollar market capitalization, only Meta Platforms is up for the year. The rest are down anywhere from about 5% (for Apple) to roughly 30% for Tesla (which as a result no longer can be counted as a trillion-dollar company), according to Koyfin data. Some of these stocks are coming off a good year in 2024, which likely mutes the pain of the sell-off. Nvidia, for instance, was up 171% last year and 239% in 2023, which puts its 15% year-to-date decline into perspective.

But for a couple—Microsoft and to a lesser extent Alphabet—last year wasn't that great either. Take Microsoft, whose partnership with OpenAI made it an early entrant in the AI revolution of the past two years. Since the start of last year, Microsoft stock has risen just 6%. Alphabet is doing a little better: It has gained about 21% since the start of last year. Still, that pales compared with Meta's 90% gain in the same period.

Given the widespread economic uncertainty sparked by Trump's continual tariff threats, the market jitters are likely to be a permanent feature of this year. The pain is extending to crypto, a sector that should be roaring right now given Trump's deregulation moves. But the negative impact of his tariffs can offset the positive impact of his other moves, as we saw on Monday, when a bitcoin sell-off wiped out most of the gains sparked earlier by his announcement about the specific cryptocurrencies he'd add to the crypto "strategic reserve" he wants to create. Coinbase dropped nearly 5% today and is off 17% for the year.

It's still early days, but it doesn't look like we're going to see a repeat of the robust market rally that accompanied the first Trump administration.

**As for TikTok...**

Meanwhile, amid Trump's tough tariff talk, the clock is ticking on TikTok. When he took office in January, Trump put a ban on the app on hold, giving TikTok 75 more days to get into compliance with a law that requires it to cut ties with its Chinese parent ByteDance or face a U.S. ban. That 75-day period runs out April 5.

In the days after Trump delayed the bill, he talked a lot about all the interest from U.S. companies in buying into TikTok. Anticipation about a deal coming soon intensified after Trump said on Jan. 25 he'd make a decision on the app's future in 30 days. But time has passed, and all the chatter about TikTok has gone quiet.

One reason may be that Trump's tariff threats against China, which almost certainly will tie into the TikTok negotiation, have only gotten worse. Judging from this New York Times story on Monday, the Chinese are not moving quickly enough for Trump's liking, because they're busy trying to figure out what the president wants. As the Chinese government will have to agree to any deal on TikTok, talks might be up in the air until the broader tariffs discussion gets underway.

TikTok fans likely have little to worry about. Trump could delay the law's implementation again if he needs to. It's possible some supporters of the law will start to complain, but there's little they can do other than sue. And fighting Trump in court won't be a speedy process.

**In Other News**

• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is planning to spend $100 billion on chip manufacturing plants in the U.S., President Donald Trump and TSMC's CEO announced at the White House on Monday.

• Alexis Ohanian, a Reddit co-founder and an investor, joined billionaire Frank McCourt's bid to acquire TikTok as a strategic adviser specializing in social media.

• Microsoft on Monday unveiled AI for doctors and nurses to automate time-consuming clerical work, such as preparing patient summaries or writing referrals based on recordings of doctor-patient conversations. The product, Dragon Copilot, will be available in the U.S. and Canada in May, Microsoft said.

Martin Peers is a columnist and co-executive editor of The Information, where he has worked since 2014. He was managing editor from 2015 through 2021. He previously worked for The Wall Street Journal and Daily Variety, among other publications. He is based in New York and is on Twitter @mvpeers.