Nvidia shares extended their losses on Thursday, closing more than 4% lower as investors continued to react to the controversy surrounding founder Jensen Huang and his departure as chief executive, in a sell-off that has wiped out more than $500 billion from the chipmaker's market value.
Nvidia has officially announced the resignation of co-founder and chief executive Jensen Huang, effective immediately, and appointed its chief financial officer, Colette Kress, as interim chief executive. The company's shares tanked more than 10% following the announcement, deepening a sell-off that has wiped out around $600 billion in market value this week.
The chipmaker's stock has faced sustained selling pressure since its board announced an independent investigation into allegations that Huang had an affair with a woman suspected of having links to Chinese intelligence. The latest decline marks another difficult trading session for the AI chipmaker as uncertainty surrounding its leadership and the allegations continues to weigh on investor sentiment.
Nvidia shares opened more than 13% lower on Thursday, wiping out over $500 billion from the company's market value in a single session, and the sell-off pushed its market capitalisation below the $4 trillion mark for the first time since July 2025. Nvidia has lost about $300 billion in market value since the board announced the investigation on Sunday.
Reuters reported that Huang was involved in an intimate relationship with a third company employee before his departure, citing two people familiar with the matter. The New York Times reported that Huang also had a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president for health care, while the Financial Times reported that Huang had admitted to a relationship with Alice Huang, an executive at cloud company Megaspeed.
Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and is its fourth-largest investor with a stake of about 3.61%, will exit the board as well. Nvidia has hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to conduct what it called a "thorough and independent" investigation, and the company says it will continue that investigation into its former chief executive.
Huang has agreed to testify before the US Congress before the Thanksgiving holiday, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast told reporters on Thursday, as lawmakers examine questions about Nvidia chip sales to China and the espionage allegations at the heart of the scandal.
The turmoil has spread across the artificial intelligence sector. AI-linked companies fell on Thursday as the deepening scandal threatened to upend the chipmaker's leadership, posing fresh risks to a sector already reeling under funding and regulatory concerns. CoreWeave dropped 6% after surging more than 27% in the previous session, while Nvidia-backed neocloud firms also fell. Shares of AMD and Broadcom, which also produce AI chips and compete with Nvidia, rose 1.7% and 0.8% respectively.
Nvidia short sellers have made about $3.8 billion in paper profits as of the last close, according to data analytics firm ORTEX, and with the share price falling to $163 those gains could swell to about $6.8 billion. Nvidia now trades at about 12 times its 12-month forward earnings estimates, its lowest since November 2012, according to data compiled by LSEG.
The company also appointed Harvey C. Jones as its first-ever board chair, and confirmed it would announce its third-quarter fiscal 2027 financial results on Tuesday, November 17. The ouster of Huang, a charismatic champion of AI startups who had invested in more than a hundred venture deals globally this year through Nvidia and its NVentures arm, sent tremors through the startup world, with founders openly worrying about what his exit means for the ecosystem he helped to build.
What happens next will depend on the investigation, on Huang's testimony before Congress, and on whether Kress can steady a company that sits at the centre of the global AI boom. For now, the market's verdict is unmistakable: the most valuable chipmaker in the world has lost its founder, its certainty and more than half a trillion dollars in a week.
