Nvidia shares tumbled more than 8% after the close of trading on Wednesday, falling to $159.51, after news that the chipmaker’s board was preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang. The selloff erased another slice of value from a company that has already lost more than $450 billion since Nov. 8, when the probe into Huang’s conduct was announced.
That is why Should I buy NVIDIA stock now is suddenly the question on a lot of desks. Huang is not just any executive. He co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and is seen by many as the face of AI, while the company’s chips supply the computing power behind frontier AI models. When the person most closely identified with the business comes under threat, investors do not wait to see how the boardroom drama ends.
Huang made the crisis harder to ignore on Sunday, when he wrote to employees that he was sorry for having an affair. “There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry,” he said in the message, and he also apologized to his wife and their two children. Nvidia launched its own investigation this week after that admission, and the issue quickly widened into a much bigger problem for a company built around one man’s reputation and one industry’s fastest-growing hardware market.
The friction is not only personal. U.S. intelligence agencies have linked Huang to Alice Huang, a Chinese business executive suspected of being an asset of China’s Ministry of State Security, and President Trump said the FBI is also investigating romantic and business ties between the two. The Trump administration was aware of the board’s plans, according to sources cited by CBS News, while The first reported that directors were preparing to remove Huang. Nvidia’s 11-person board includes Huang, and the other directors are listed as independent in a regulatory filing, which means any move against him would have to come from a board he sits on himself.
That leaves the market with the question that matters now: whether the board follows through. Wall Street analysts say Huang’s departure would be a major blow, and Dan Ives has said investors will be left weighing who might succeed him, how that would affect short-term strategy, and what government investigations might uncover. Congress is also expected to press company executives over whether Nvidia’s chips are being funneled to China through other countries. For now, the stock move says as much as the statements do: investors are already pricing in a far messier Nvidia than the one that entered the week.
