Nvidia is down 26% from its October peak. Most of that was the AI sell-off, but on Monday every other chip stock rallied and Nvidia sank. Huang isn't going anywhere yet, and there's no one lined up if he does.
Nvidia shares are down about 26% from their 6 October record, roughly US$1.5 trillion in value.
Most of the fall came from last week's AI chip sell-off after the US midterms, not the scandal.
On Monday AMD, Broadcom and the Nasdaq all rallied while Nvidia fell about 5%. That gap is the Huang discount.
Huang hasn't stepped down, the board backs him, and Nvidia has no named successor.
Earnings on 17 November are the real test for Nvidia and the AI boom.
A month ago Nvidia was worth close to US$5.8 trillion. As of Monday afternoon in New York, the shares are down about 26% from their 6 October peak, and that’s roughly US$1.5 trillion gone. Jensen Huang didn’t cause all of that. But Monday was the first day the market got to put a price on his admitted affair with a woman US intelligence reportedly believes was working for China, and the price it put on it was brutal.
Here’s how big the crash really is, which part of it is Huang’s fault, whether he’s on his way out, and what it means for the AI boom that turned a graphics card company into the most valuable business on Earth.
Nvidia closed at a record US$239.24 on 6 October. By Monday afternoon it was changing hands around US$177, and at its worst point on the day it hit US$170.24. That low was down 8.8% on the day, which Bloomberg says briefly wiped close to US$400 billion off its value.
Most of the damage was done before Huang’s email, and that matters. The stock had been sliding through October, then on Thursday 5 November it fell 9.3% in a single day. That was the whole AI chip sector getting smashed after the US midterms handed Democrats control of Congress. The Nasdaq had its worst day since April 2025, the main chip ETF had its worst day since March 2020, and AMD, Micron and Applied Materials all fell by double digits. Investors were already asking how all this data centre spending gets paid for, and whether new rules and permit fights slow it down.
Then came Monday, and this is the chart that should worry Nvidia’s board. Chip stocks bounced hard after last week’s beating. AMD was up 13%, Broadcom almost 9%, the Philadelphia chip index nearly 7% and the Nasdaq close to 3%. Nvidia was the only one going backwards, down about 5%. Same industry, same customers, same AI trade. The only difference is the bloke in the leather jacket.
Panmure Liberum’s Joachim Klement told CNBC the damage is contained to Nvidia for now. That’s the good news for the AI trade and the bad news for Nvidia: the market isn’t panicking about AI, it’s panicking about Jensen.
No. Not yet, anyway. Nobody has reported a resignation, and Nvidia says he’s committed to continuing to lead the company as CEO without interruption. The board says it has confidence in him, and that it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised.
This is the real scandal for shareholders. Nvidia has no named successor and no public succession plan, and its filings to the SEC don’t name one. Huang has run the company since he co-founded it in 1993. He’s 63, and in a podcast with Lex Fridman in March he said succession planning just creates anxiety. Futurum analyst Daniel Newman put it bluntly to CBS: there is no leader in the company who would be the clear next step, and Jensen is Nvidia’s Steve Jobs.
Asked who could step up, FedWatch strategist Ben Emons pointed to CFO Colette Kress for investor credibility, Ian Buck or Bryan Catanzaro for technical vision, or Jay Puri or Debora Shoquist on the customer and supply side. That’s an analyst spitballing, not a shortlist from Nvidia. Nobody on that list has been put forward.
Not on the numbers we have, but the mood has changed. A month ago the only question was how many chips Nvidia could make. Now there are three. Can the big tech companies keep spending at this rate? Goldman Sachs reckons the top five hyperscalers will put around US$800 billion into AI infrastructure this year, and some of them are now burning cash or borrowing to do it. Will a Democrat Congress and state-level permit fights slow the data centre build-out? And can the world’s most important AI company keep its founder out of a spy story?
The first real answer lands on 17 November, when Nvidia reports its third quarter. It has guided to about US$108 billion in revenue, plus or minus 2%. If it beats that and says demand is still bigger than supply, the AI trade probably shrugs this off and Nvidia gets its discount back. If the guidance wobbles at the same time as the board investigation drags on, that’s when this turns into the AI bubble story everyone has been waiting to write. The briefing Congress wants lands the next day.
Nvidia’s gaming business is a rounding error next to AI, and it’s been acting like it. It pulled the RTX 5080 and 5090 from its own store last month. A company busy fighting a share price crash, a board investigation and Congress isn’t about to start caring about cheap graphics cards. If the AI money does start drying up, though, the gaming market is where Nvidia would come crawling back.
Strip out the soap opera and the market said something pretty clear on Monday. The AI trade had a rough week, but it’s still breathing. What it doesn’t trust right now is Nvidia’s leadership. Every other chip stock rallied and Nvidia sank. That’s a Huang discount, and it’s on him.
But the bigger failure is the board’s. A US$4 trillion company with one irreplaceable boss and no succession plan isn’t visionary, it’s reckless. Huang laughing off succession as anxiety looked quirky a month ago. Now it looks like the reason Nvidia is getting hit harder than everyone else. Whatever the investigation finds, the board should come out of it with a named successor, because the next scandal might not wait for an earnings beat to bail them out.
Is Nvidia a buy at a 26% discount, or is this just the start? Come argue about it in the GetRekt Discord.
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