Nvidia market value drops by more than $1 trillion in under a month

Jensen Huang stepped down as chief executive of Nvidia on Thursday morning. Within minutes of the markets opening, the share price fell enough to erase roughly $546 billion of market capitalisation. The scandal that followed has pushed the chipmaker’s total valuation down by more than $1 trillion.

The public fallout began in late October when The New York Times reported that Huang had a “close relationship” with Alice Huang, a former executive of Singapore‑based chip buyer Megaspeed and alleged asset of China’s Ministry of State Security. The two are not known to be related. At that point Nvidia’s market capitalisation was about $5.2 trillion.

On 8 November the company announced an internal investigation after Jensen publicly acknowledged the affair. By the following morning the loss in market value had reached roughly $1 trillion since the scandal emerged.

“Huang is irreplaceable,” Ryan Fedasiuk, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, told WIRED last week. “He built Nvidia into the juggernaut it is today, and he was the visionary behind the GPU, which has sustained the intelligence revolution.”

Nvidia’s chips power most major AI models and the firm holds sizeable stakes in other tech groups. An August regulatory filing showed it owned nearly $30 billion of Intel stock and about $21 billion of SpaceX stock. While Nvidia’s share price slumped, rivals benefited: AMD shares rose 28 percent over the past five days and Broadcom gained almost 16 percent.

The company commands roughly 90 percent of chips used to train frontier AI models. It has invested at least $100 million in eight AI firms, according to the same filing. Huang received $36 million in pay last year and owned 3.5 percent of Nvidia as of March, a stake now worth more than $50 billion less. Reported affairs total two, at least one PR firm with sex‑scandal expertise has been hired, and three of Huang’s relatives – a son, a daughter and a son‑in‑law – work at Nvidia. He also owns several leather jackets, including a $960,000 Tom Ford piece.