Jensen Huang Resignation Wipes $500 Billion From Nvidia in a Week as Spy Scandal Triggers Congressional Probes and Chip Export Crackdown

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's president, chief executive and board member on November 12, 2026, effective immediately, after reports emerged of extramarital affairs with a woman described as a suspected Chinese spy and with at least one company employee. Chief financial officer Colette Kress was named interim CEO while retaining her finance role, as the board opened a search for a permanent successor. Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and led it for more than three decades, hired law firm Paul Weiss for his legal defense and in his final hours reportedly called himself "a piece of sh*t." He subsequently tentatively agreed to testify before House lawmakers after three Republican committee chairs issued an ultimatum ahead of an 8 p.m. Friday deadline.

The resignation capped a six-week share slide that has erased roughly $1.6 trillion in Nvidia's market value since its early-October peak near $5 trillion, leaving the stock at approximately $3.83 trillion before Friday's partial recovery. Nvidia shares opened more than 13% lower on Thursday before closing down about 4.3%, then rebounded roughly 6 to 7% in premarket trading on Friday as retail investors piled in. Data showed retail buyers purchased a net $1.6 billion in Nvidia shares over three trading days ending Wednesday, the largest such three-day inflow in at least a year, with Nvidia accounting for 61% of all net retail stock and ETF purchases. Despite that buying, AMD outperformed Nvidia by 53.2 percentage points over five trading days, the widest gap since Nvidia's 1999 IPO, while Broadcom gained 24% over the same period.

At the center of the scandal is Alice Huang, the Singapore-based woman described as a suspected Chinese spy, though multiple US intelligence officials told CNN that evidence gathered so far, including intercepted communications reviewed by the FBI for at least a year, does not prove she was knowingly funneling information to Beijing. Officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence called the spy label "not entirely accurate and over-torqued," and Attorney General Todd Blanche said no conclusions had been reached about her status. Separately, Bloomberg reported that a company Alice Huang founded procured smuggled, US-restricted Nvidia chips that were installed at a Shanghai data center with links to Megaspeed International, the Singapore-registered cloud firm at the center of the broader chip-diversion investigation. Singapore filed 41 charges against a man tied to an alleged chip-smuggling scheme involving Nvidia processors shipped to Malaysia.

The Washington fallout is widening rapidly. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly blamed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for failing to add Megaspeed to the US entity list, saying Treasury, State, USTR and the Defense Department had pushed for the blacklisting for months but that "Commerce has the pen." Bessent also questioned whether Nvidia had any robust controls to prevent chip leakage to shell companies, and said China should receive nothing more advanced than Nvidia's H100 processors. Lutnick agreed to testify voluntarily before the Senate Banking Committee on December 10. A Reuters review identified more than $3 billion in Chinese AI computing projects built around Nvidia's restricted processors, and Congress is building bipartisan momentum for tighter chip export restrictions, a move that Reuters and others said is now more likely following the departure of Huang, who had been the AI chip industry's most prominent opponent of export controls.

Internally, Nvidia faces compounding uncertainty. The Wall Street Journal reported that Huang described Kress as "a deer in the headlights" during an August meeting with the senior finance team, the same period in which Kress had been raising concerns about Nvidia's rapidly expanding off-balance-sheet financial commitments. Those commitments totaled $530 billion in Nvidia's most recent filing, up from $184 billion just one quarter earlier, encompassing supply guarantees, a $105 billion guarantee on OpenAI's Ohio data center, and $36 billion in agreements to purchase unused cloud capacity from smaller AI cloud companies. Kress had previously cut the OpenAI guarantee from $250 billion to $105 billion over Huang's objections. Analysts and investors now question whether Kress will scale back the aggressive financing strategy that helped Nvidia create a circular demand loop, with the company acting simultaneously as investor, lender, chip supplier and backup customer to the same set of AI cloud firms.

Multiple brokerages downgraded Nvidia on Friday: Baird cut its rating to Neutral and slashed its price target to $200 from $500, Bernstein moved to Market Perform with a $200 target, Evercore ISI went to In-Line with a $186 target, and Barclays and Needham also reduced their targets on leadership uncertainty. Wells Fargo reiterated its Overweight rating and Wedbush's Dan Ives cut his price target but remained bullish, while Seaport Research maintained a sell rating. Billionaire shareholder Leo KoGuan said he will not invest additional money in Nvidia without Huang at the helm. Inside the company, an internal suggestion forum drew more than 1,600 comments, the majority calling for Huang's reinstatement and describing him as deserving a second chance. An online poll of nearly 23,000 respondents showed 91.5% supporting Huang's return. Nvidia confirmed to South Korea that it will honor its previously announced pledge to supply 260,000 advanced GPUs to the country, and investment commitments in France were also said to remain intact.

Kress acknowledged an "extraordinarily difficult period" in an internal email and announced a company-wide meeting for November 18. Nvidia is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on Tuesday, November 17, the first results since Huang's exit and the first Huang will not present. President Trump, who reportedly urged Huang to fight for his job as recently as two days before the resignation and said Huang called him expressing remorse, publicly suggested Apple CEO Tim Cook as a potential replacement. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives named Cook, Google CEO Thomas Kurian and Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora among the strongest external candidates.