Nvidia Announces Huang's Resignation Amid $1 Trillion Valuation Loss
WIRED AI reported that Nvidia announced Jensen Huang had resigned from the company. Less than an hour after markets opened, Nvidia had lost roughly $546 billion in market value. Although the stock had rebounded somewhat, the preceding weeks of scandal had reduced the chipmaker's valuation by more than $1 trillion; the report did not attribute the entire decline to Huang's resignation.
Nvidia's chips are used to train most major AI models, and the report estimated its share of chips used to train frontier AI models at roughly 90%. Huang's departure therefore raises questions about the company's leadership and Nvidia's position in the global economy, while AMD and Broadcom shares rose during the period.
On Thursday morning, Nvidia announced that Jensen Huang had resigned from the company that had become, in many ways, synonymous with its chief executive.
Less than an hour later, when the markets opened, Nvidia’s stock had lost roughly $546 billion in market value. Though it has rebounded somewhat, the last weeks of scandal—including a reported second affair with an Nvidia employee—have tanked the chipmaker’s valuation by more than $1 trillion.
Huang’s very public downfall began in late October, when The New York Times reported that the CEO had a “close relationship” with Alice Huang, a former executive at the Singapore-based chip buyer Megaspeed and an alleged asset of China’s Ministry of State Security. (The two are not known to be related.) At that time, Nvidia’s market cap was around $5.2 trillion.
On November 8, Nvidia announced it was investigating its CEO, after Jensen publicly acknowledged the affair. By the following morning, roughly $1 trillion had been erased since the scandal started.
If you hang out with a certain type of person who thinks of themselves as a daytrader, they might have talked about “buying the dip” over drinks last weekend. If you believe Nvidia can thrive without Huang, there’s still time! The dip has dipped even further. But the early consensus seems to be that this could be more of a prolonged plunge.