Technology shares fell sharply around the world on Friday, 6 November 2026, as the outcome of the US midterm elections compounded existing worries about the pace of artificial intelligence spending, the BBC reported. Tudor Brown, who co-founded the British chip and software designer Arm Holdings, said unease about the "pretext of almost infinite AI growth and data centres" had been building before the vote. He was speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
Brown told the programme that investors began to feel uneasy around June, when concerns about the cost of borrowing took hold, and that rising interest rates intensified those fears. According to the BBC, he said the midterm results then triggered a "panic", driven by apprehension that AI expansion could be restrained — for example through restrictions on constructing data centres.
Despite that, Brown urged a calmer reading of the situation. He said that, viewed from a distance, the turmoil is "not as catastrophic as you might think".
Why it matters
The sell-off matters because AI has become one of the largest drivers of equity valuations worldwide, and the companies building chips, servers and data centres sit at the centre of that. When confidence in the sector wobbles, the effects spread well beyond a handful of firms.
Brown's remarks also point to a shift in what is worrying investors. Rather than doubts about whether AI technology works, the concerns he described centre on money — the cost of debt and the price of interest — and on politics, specifically whether governments might slow the build-out of the physical infrastructure that AI depends on. The BBC's report frames the midterms as an accelerant rather than the root cause, with pressure already visible months earlier.
For the UK, the comments carry extra weight because they come from a figure associated with Arm, one of the country's most prominent technology businesses. His assessment that large profits are still being generated in the sector offers a counterweight to the gloom, though he did not dispute that the market reaction was severe.
Power, politics and the data centre question
Brown acknowledged that supplying energy to power-hungry data centres is a genuine problem, according to the BBC. Even so, he argued that anyone who treats AI as an important technology — one needed for "the way we evolve our lives" — must accept that data centres will be built. He described them as, to some extent, a necessary evil.
That framing captures the tension at the heart of the current market mood. Data centres underpin the AI services that investors have poured money into, yet they consume large amounts of electricity and are increasingly a subject of political debate. Brown's suggestion that election results have fed fears of curbs on construction indicates that policy risk is now being priced in alongside energy costs.
He also pointed to the debt side of the equation. His account places the start of investor nervousness in June, tied to borrowing costs, with rate rises making matters worse. That sequence suggests the AI trade has become sensitive to financing conditions in a way it may not have been during earlier phases of the boom.
What Brown expects next
Brown's conclusion was measured. He said he expects people to step back, recognise that these companies continue to earn substantial amounts of money, and for the market to recover somewhat. The BBC reported his view that a partial rebound is likely once that reassessment takes place.
He did not offer a timeline, and he did not dismiss the scale of the falls. His position is essentially that the underlying business case remains intact even as sentiment has turned sharply negative.
Investors will now be watching two things: whether political debate in the US translates into concrete limits on data centre development, and whether borrowing costs continue to weigh on the companies most exposed to AI spending.
