Nvidia Sheds About $340 Billion After Hours as Its Board Reportedly Prepares to Oust Jensen Huang, Exposing the AI Trade’s Biggest Key-Person Risk

Nvidia ended Wednesday’s regular session with a 2.9% gain and a sense that the worst of the week was behind it. Within hours, that relief was gone. After The Wall Street Journal reported that the chipmaker’s board is preparing to remove co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, the stock fell roughly 8% in after-hours trading, wiping out about $340 billion in market value on paper, according to StockAnalysis.

For investors, the story is no longer about one executive’s personal conduct. It is about what happens to the single most important stock in the AI trade when the person most closely identified with it may be about to leave, with no publicly known successor and Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings just six days away.

What Was Reported Wednesday

According to Reuters, citing the Journal, the board was preparing to meet as soon as Wednesday to decide Huang’s future, following reports of two extramarital relationships, including one with a woman U.S. intelligence officials suspect of working for China. Earlier the same day, The New York Times reported a second relationship, with an Nvidia executive who reports to Huang. CBS News said two sources confirmed the board was preparing to oust him soon, and that the Trump administration is aware of the matter.

Nvidia had not commented on the reports as of Wednesday evening. The board’s most recent public statement, posted on November 8, announced an independent investigation overseen by a committee of independent directors with outside counsel, said it had “no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised,” and expressed confidence in Huang and his leadership team. Reuters reported that the board hired Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to run the probe. No decision had been confirmed at the time of writing.

The Numbers Behind the Selloff

• Nvidia closed at $173.73 on Wednesday and traded near $159.97 after the report, according to AFP via the NZ Herald. Semafor said the drop put the stock at a 52-week low.
• Including the after-hours move, Nvidia has lost about $600 billion in market value this week since the board announced its investigation, Reuters calculated.
• Nasdaq-100 futures fell about 1% and S&P 500 futures about 0.4% Wednesday evening as the selling resumed, CNBC reported.
• Rivals moved the other way: AMD rose about 4% and Broadcom about 3% after hours, according to MarketWatch.

The whipsaw came on a day when the broader market had been celebrating. The S&P 500 rose 1.3% and the Nasdaq Composite 1.6%, led by a roughly 25% jump in CoreWeave and a 5.6% rally in semiconductor stocks, according to Investopedia and Reuters.

A Founder-Led Giant Without a Named Successor

Huang has run Nvidia for 33 years and, as TechCrunch noted, has said he keeps about 60 direct reports and delegates very little. The company has no obvious successor or public succession plan. “Mr. Huang being removed immediately could be challenging for Nvidia since it does not have a succession plan in place,” D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria told Reuters, adding that investors would expect the board to meet its fiduciary duty if laws or policies were broken.

Others argued the franchise is bigger than its founder. Longbow Asset Management CEO Jake Dollarhide told Reuters he expects the board to wait until it has “an all-star, a known entity in the tech sector” lined up, and that Nvidia’s chips will remain “the centerpiece of the AI story” with or without Huang.

Why It Matters to Investors

Key-person risk is now an index risk. Nvidia is a roughly $4 trillion company, per Reuters, which makes it one of the heaviest weights in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100. Anyone holding a broad index fund, a tech ETF or a semiconductor fund has meaningful exposure to how this board handles a leadership transition, whether they own Nvidia shares directly or not.

Earnings are the next stress test. Nvidia reports third-quarter results on Tuesday, November 17, after the close. If the CEO question is resolved before then, management will face pointed questions about customer relationships, export dealings and the product roadmap. If it is not, the call itself could become a referendum on governance rather than on demand for AI chips.

The relationships question. Huang has been the face of Nvidia’s dealings with governments, hyperscalers and Asian suppliers. Investors will want to know how quickly those relationships can transfer, and whether the national-security dimension of the reports invites more scrutiny from Washington at a time when the midterm results have already put data center policy in play.

Rotation inside the AI trade. The after-hours pops in AMD and Broadcom suggest some traders see a chance to take share of wallet or simply of portfolio weight. That does not mean Nvidia’s technical lead disappears overnight, but it does mean the market may start pricing more competition into the AI hardware stack.

Macro backdrop is not forgiving. This is unfolding as investors brace for a possible Federal Reserve rate hike after a hot October inflation report, with the 10-year Treasury yield touching 5.03% on Tuesday, according to Investopedia. Higher rates leave less room for richly valued growth stocks to absorb a governance shock.

What to Watch Next

The immediate items are any board statement on Huang’s status, whether an interim CEO is named, and how Thursday’s regular session absorbs the after-hours drop. Beyond that, the November 17 earnings report and any guidance changes will show whether the business is insulated from the turmoil at the top. For long-term investors, the episode is a reminder to check how concentrated their portfolios really are in a handful of AI names, and how much of each company’s value rests on a single leader.

Nvidia’s chips still power most of the AI boom. What the market is repricing tonight is not the technology but the certainty around who leads it. That uncertainty is likely to linger until the board speaks.

Edited by Coron @QUE.COM
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