Jensen Huang Quits Nvidia, Leaving a $1 Trillion Hole Behind

Nvidia announced Thursday morning that Jensen Huang had resigned from the company he built into the defining name in AI chips. Within an hour of the opening bell, Nvidia's stock had shed roughly $546 billion in market value. The shares have clawed back some ground since, but WIRED reports the scandal has now drained more than $1 trillion from the chipmaker's valuation.

The crash has a timeline. In late October, The New York Times reported that Huang had a close relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based chip buyer Megaspeed and an alleged asset of China's Ministry of State Security. The two are not known to be related. Nvidia's market cap was around $5.2 trillion at that point, and on November 8 the company said it was investigating its CEO after Jensen publicly acknowledged the affair. By the next morning, roughly $1 trillion had vanished.

The verdict from the policy world is grim. Ryan Fedasiuk, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, told WIRED last week that Huang is irreplaceable, saying he built Nvidia into the juggernaut it is today and was the visionary behind the GPU that sustained the intelligence revolution. A reported second affair with an Nvidia employee, and at least one PR firm brought in with sex-scandal expertise, has kept the story burning.

Nvidia's weight makes the exit an economy-sized problem. Its chips train most major AI models, and it holds roughly 90 percent of the market for chips used in training frontier AI models. Per an August regulatory filing, the company owned nearly $30 billion in Intel stock and about $21 billion in SpaceX stock, and it has put at least $100 million into eight different AI companies.

Rivals are eating the fallout: AMD shares are up 28 percent over the last five days, while Broadcom has climbed nearly 16 percent. Huang's own stake took the hit too. He owned 3.5 percent of Nvidia as of March, a slice the scandal has devalued by more than $50 billion, on top of $36 million in pay last year. Nvidia still employs one son, one daughter and one son-in-law of its former CEO.