Nvidia Board Weighs Jensen Huang’s Future as Shares Slide After Reports It Is Preparing to Oust Him

The board of Nvidia, the world’s dominant maker of AI chips, met late on Wednesday to decide the fate of its chief executive Jensen Huang — after reports that it was preparing to remove the founder who has run the company for 33 years.

Key Points

• Nvidia Jensen Huang board — the board met late on Wednesday to decide Huang’s future as it grapples with reports of two extramarital affairs involving its longtime leader.
• The Wall Street Journal reported the board was preparing to oust Huang, minutes after The New York Times reported he had a relationship with an executive who reported to him.
• Nvidia shares fell about 8% in late trading on Wednesday, taking them to a 52-week low and roughly 20% below where they stood in late October.
• The company reports quarterly results on 17 November, when the focus will inevitably be on leadership as much as on the numbers.

Huang is the only boss Nvidia has ever had, and the company is a roughly $4 trillion business whose chips power most of the world’s AI systems. The board launched an independent investigation on 8 November into reports that Huang may have been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation, following reports that he had an extramarital affair with a businesswoman who was alleged to be a Chinese spy. The investigation will examine claims that Huang may have been targeted, and the FBI is separately examining whether he was targeted by a foreign intelligence operation.

Bloomberg reported that the board has hired an outside firm to identify candidates, and Semafor said some directors favour chief financial officer Colette Kress as interim chief executive. No decision had been announced at the time of writing. The selling rippled through the AI supply chain in late trading: Micron and CoreWeave fell, as did Intel, Qualcomm and Arm, while rivals AMD and Broadcom moved the other way, up around 4% and 3% respectively, as some investors bet on customers splitting their orders. Shares in China’s leading makers of graphics processing units surged on Thursday, as the turmoil boosted expectations that local chip suppliers could win greater market share.

Why the AI trade is watching

Investors fear that losing Huang might dampen Nvidia’s willingness to bankroll the AI boom, in yet another pressure point on the global markets’ most crowded trade. Nvidia has been the banner stock of the AI revolution, with its chip technology ahead of rivals and enormous sales driving the share price up some 900% over the four years since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT ushered in the AI era.

The company has listed some $164.5 billion in financial commitments in its most recent earnings report, with an obligation capped at $105 billion on an OpenAI data centre in Ohio and lease and other capacity guarantees topping $50 billion. When Nvidia reports earnings next week, the focus will inevitably be on leadership, strategy and whether a sales outlook formed under Huang still holds up under a potential successor.

The spying allegation has also turned a boardroom drama into a national security story. US senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons have asked the Commerce Department and the White House to preserve records on exports of Nvidia’s advanced chips to China — the same export-control questions at the heart of the procurement scandal that has already wiped hundreds of billions of dollars off the company’s value.

For background on the scandal, see our report on a blacklisted Chinese university buying Nvidia H200 AI chips, and on Anthropic launching Claude Fable 5.2 ahead of its planned IPO. More in our Technology section.

Sources: Reuters, “Investors worry the AI trade needs Nvidia’s Huang and its largesse” (https://wncy.com/2026/11/12/analysis-investors-worry-the-ai-trade-needs-nvidias-huang-and-its-largesse/); ABP Live, “Nvidia Challengers: AMD, Broadcom, Or TSMC? Who Could Benefit If Jensen Huang Loses His Grip” (https://news.abplive.com/business/nvidia-jensen-huang-crisis-amd-broadcom-tsmc-ai-chip-market-1875578/amp).