Nvidia announced on Thursday morning that Jensen Huang has resigned from the company.
Less than an hour later, the market opened and the stock price fell by roughly $546 billion. Although the value has recovered somewhat, the recent weeks of scandal, including a second reported affair with an Nvidia employee, have eroded the chip maker’s valuation by more than $1 trillion.
The public collapse began in late October when The New York Times reported a “close relationship” between the CEO and Alice Huang. She is a former executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based chip buyer, and is alleged to be an asset of China’s Ministry of State Security. The two are not known to be related. At that time, Nvidia’s market capitalisation stood at around $5.2 trillion.
On November 8, Nvidia stated it was investigating its CEO after Jensen publicly acknowledged the affair. By the following morning, approximately $1 trillion in value had vanished since the scandal started.
Some traders may have discussed “buying the dip” over drinks last weekend. If investors believe Nvidia can thrive without Huang, there is still time. The price has fallen further. However, the early consensus suggests this could be a prolonged decline.
“Huang is irreplaceable,” Ryan Fedasiuk, a senior fellow at the think tank Foundation for American Innovation, told WIRED last week. “He built Nvidia into the juggernaut it is today, and he was the visionary behind the GPU, which has sustained the intelligence revolution.”
Significant questions remain about what the departure means for the global economy. Nvidia’s chips are used to train most major AI models. The company has also invested billions in various tech firms. According to an August regulatory filing, Nvidia owned nearly $30 billion worth of Intel stock and roughly $21 billion of SpaceX stock.
For now, Nvidia’s loss represents a gain for other chipmakers. AMD shares have risen 28 percent over the last five days, and Broadcom is up nearly 16 percent.
More Numbers That Illuminate Huang’s Value
- Nvidia’s market share of chips used in training frontier AI models: Roughly 90 percent
- AI companies in which Nvidia has invested at least $100 million: 8, as of its August filing
- Huang’s pay last year: $36 million
- Portion of Nvidia owned by Huang: 3.5 percent, as of March—which means the scandal has devalued Huang’s own share of the company by more than $50 billion
- Reported affairs: 2 (so far)
- PR firms hired with expertise in sex scandals: At least one
- Huang relatives employed by Nvidia: One son, one daughter, and one son-in-law
- Leather jackets owned: Several, including a $960,000 Tom Ford number. (But not that vintage Saint Laurent jacket everyone was talking about on X.)
