Nvidia Board Fires Jensen Huang as CEO After Affairs Scandal Triggers Market Rout and Succession Search

Nvidia's board removed Jensen Huang as chief executive on November 12, 2026, ending his tenure at the company he co-founded and built into the world's dominant AI chipmaker, after reports of two extramarital affairs, one of them with a woman U.S. officials suspect is a Chinese spy. The board had been meeting remotely throughout the day to decide his fate; by mid-morning New York time, social media posts and analyst notes were treating the firing as confirmed. Elon Musk said it would be "an honor" to hire Huang at SpaceX, adding an extraordinary coda to one of the most turbulent weeks in Nvidia's history.

The crisis deepened in the hours before the decision as a New York Times report detailed a second affair, with Kimberly Powell, 48, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare and an 18-year company veteran who had been a direct report of Huang's. That revelation compounded the earlier scandal over Huang's admitted relationship with Alice Huang, founder of Singapore-based Megaspeed International, whom U.S. officials have identified as a suspected operative of China's Ministry of State Security. Alice Huang has since returned to Beijing, where Chinese security officials are aware of her presence; Beijing has denied she is a spy and accused Washington of fabricating spy claims as a pretext for a technology blockade.

Nvidia shares fell as much as 10 percent in after-hours trading on Wednesday before stabilizing at a premarket low near $156, and were trading around $160 at the time of the board's decision, down roughly 8 percent from the prior close of $173.73. The sell-off wiped an estimated $900 billion from Nvidia's market value over the week when combined with earlier losses. Nasdaq 100 futures fell 0.79 percent and S&P 500 futures fell 0.38 percent as the drama dominated global market sentiment. Rivals Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom rose, with William Blair upgrading AMD to Outperform and citing a potential leadership vacuum at Nvidia as a catalyst for AMD data center revenue to surpass its server CPU business as early as the fourth quarter.

At least five brokerages downgraded Nvidia or removed their price targets. Bernstein cut its rating to Market Perform and slashed its price target from $400 to $200. Oppenheimer removed its price target entirely while downgrading to Perform, with analyst Rick Schafer calling a Huang exit "a material, potentially thesis-changing event" and warning of massive shoes to fill with no obvious successor. Evercore ISI cut to In Line with a $186 target and said the board investigation could take five months or longer. William Blair and Melius also downgraded; Melius set a $185 target. Among those holding their ratings, Raymond James kept a Strong Buy at $515 and UBS maintained Buy at $300. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives put Nvidia's value at $300 per share with Huang and $225 without him.

The board had been working with an outside executive search firm to identify CEO candidates before the firing was announced. Some directors favored CFO Colette Kress as interim chief executive, according to Semafor, while Reuters identified senior engineer Ian Buck as the other leading internal candidate. Bloomberg reported Nvidia was weighing a temporary appointment before conducting a wider search. No permanent successor was named alongside the removal.

The scandal intensified pressure on multiple political and regulatory fronts. Republican congressional leaders said they were preparing to subpoena Huang, while Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons asked the Trump administration to preserve all records related to Nvidia's advanced semiconductor exports to China. President Trump separately authorized a third crackdown this year on companies suspected of diverting Nvidia chips to China. The White House said it was not intervening in the board's decision. Megaspeed, the Singapore firm at the center of the espionage allegations, pledged cooperation with U.S. inspections and said it takes export control laws seriously; Reuters reported that the company had registered affiliates in the U.S., Australia and elsewhere, with a 29-year-old listing his address as a newsagent and lottery retailer in a regional Australian town.

The ripple effects spread across the AI supply chain. Taiwan's Taiex index fell 2.6 percent, with AI server manufacturers Wiwynn and Quanta each dropping more than 6 percent and TSMC declining 2.3 percent. South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix fell 1.6 percent. Asian partners and suppliers were described as redrawing contingency plans. Chinese AI companies rushed to rent Nvidia-powered computing capacity at data centers outside China, fearing the scandal would prompt Washington to restrict their remote access to advanced processors; grey-market traders were also stockpiling restricted Nvidia chips. Alibaba shares fell 7 percent in Hong Kong on concerns over Chinese cloud operators' chip access. One supply chain report flagged a separate technical setback: Nvidia's next-generation Rubin GPU platform has been delayed to 2027 due to motherboard warpage, though the HBM4 yield issue was said to have been resolved in October; Nvidia has increased Blackwell orders in the interim.