Nvidia Stock Falls 13% as Trump Urged Huang to Fight On

Nvidia stock has fallen 13 percent in a week, wiping out more than 573 billion dollars of market value, after Jensen Huang resigned as chief executive of the company he co-founded and led for 33 years. The slide came as new reporting revealed that President Donald Trump had personally called Huang two days before the resignation and urged him to fight to keep his job, a last attempt to save a chief executive who had become one of the president’s closest allies in the technology industry.

The call, reported by The New York Times, took place on Tuesday, November 10. According to two people briefed on the conversation, the president urged Huang to keep fighting for his position at Nvidia, even as a scandal over the chipmaker’s chief executive was unfolding fast around him. It was the latest instance of Trump defending and protecting Huang, who had become a high-profile ally and an influential adviser on artificial intelligence, and the president continued to back him to the end, even after American intelligence agencies had concluded that Huang was having an affair with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy.

Two days later, on Thursday, November 12, Nvidia announced that Huang had been replaced as chief executive. The company named its chief financial officer, Colette Kress, as interim chief executive while the board searches for a permanent successor, and it appointed Harvey C. Jones as its first-ever chair of the board. Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in April 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem and had been its only chief executive from the outset, stepped down as president, chief executive and board member all at once.

Nvidia Stock: A Week of Losses in Numbers

The market’s verdict on the upheaval was swift and severe. Nvidia stock fell 2 percent on Friday to close at 162.85 dollars a share, bringing the weekly decline to 13 percent, the steepest weekly loss since April 2025 and the company’s sixth consecutive losing week, its longest such streak since 2012. On Thursday, the day the resignation was announced, the shares had fallen as much as 14 percent in early trading to their lowest level since June 2025, before recovering some ground to close down 4.3 percent. In two sessions, the stock had lost 8.8 percent at its lowest point on Friday.

The damage extends well beyond the week of the resignation. Since the beginning of October, Nvidia has lost roughly 30 percent of its market value, or approximately 1.7 trillion dollars, and it has slipped below Apple in the ranking of the world’s most valuable companies. The shares have now fallen 14 percent on a year-to-date basis, underperforming the S&P 500’s 10 percent gain over the same period. Through Tuesday of this week, Nvidia had lost 18 percent in five sessions, a steeper slide than during the DeepSeek shock of January 2025, when a Chinese artificial intelligence model rattled American technology stocks.

The contrast with the rest of the market was stark. While Nvidia sank, the broader market bounced: by Friday morning the Nasdaq 100 was up nearly 5 percent for the week, the S&P 500 more than 3 percent and the Dow about 2 percent. The artificial intelligence trade, which had carried the market for much of the year, finally found its footing again, and it did so without its figurehead. Nvidia, the company at the centre of that trade, was left behind.

The Tuesday Call: What Trump Told Huang

The president’s call to Huang on Tuesday was the culmination of a relationship that had grown unusually close. Huang had emerged as a prominent ally of the president and an influential adviser on artificial intelligence, with extraordinary access to the White House, including a ride aboard Air Force One. Trump later told Huang: “You’re taking over the world, Jensen,” a remark that captured how the president viewed the chipmaker’s chief: not just as a business leader, but as a central figure in America’s contest with China over the technology of the future.

That closeness is also what made the scandal so damaging. According to the Times report, the president had been warned at least twice about Huang’s relationship with a Chinese citizen known as Alice Huang, whom intelligence agencies concluded had been recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security. Alice Huang is a former senior executive at Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based company that buys large volumes of Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence chips, and American intelligence had examined whether she had connections to China’s security services and whether her relationship with Jensen Huang could have been used to obtain sensitive information.

The allegations have not been established, and American intelligence officials remain divided over the strength of the evidence. A CNN report said intelligence collected on Alice Huang, including intercepted communications, has not conclusively demonstrated that she knowingly passed information to Beijing. The FBI has reportedly been investigating the matter for at least a year, and Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Thursday that neither the Justice Department nor he nor FBI Director Kash Patel had reached a conclusion about Alice Huang’s alleged intelligence connections.

Huang admitted the affair himself. On Sunday, November 8, he sent a memo to staff in which he admitted he had been unfaithful with Alice Huang and apologised to his wife Lori, to whom he has been married for more than 40 years, and to his children. The same day, Nvidia’s board said it would conduct an independent investigation into whether Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence operation. The scandal escalated on Wednesday night, when the board convened after a New York Times report revealed a second affair, this time with Kimberly Powell, the company’s vice president of health care. Huang’s representative did not provide a comment for the Times report about the president’s call, and neither Trump nor the White House responded to requests for comment about it.

Trump defended Huang in public even as the scandal intensified. Earlier in the week, he described the Nvidia chief as an honourable person and said he believed Huang was unaware of the alleged intelligence connections of the Chinese businesswoman linked to him. In an interview on Thursday with sports commentator Stephen A. Smith for Smith’s “Straight Shooter” podcast, the president said he had spoken with Huang the day before. “I always thought of him as a fine man,” Trump said. “He’s going through hell.” He called Huang a tremendous talent, said his departure was sad, and even floated Tim Cook, the former chief executive of Apple, as a possible successor. Trump also avoided making a definitive assessment when Smith asked about the resignation, saying Huang’s decision to step down could be viewed differently depending on whether the espionage allegations were proven.

Nvidia News: The Chip Deal at the Centre of the Scandal

The affair is not the only reason the scandal reaches into the White House. At Huang’s urging, Trump allowed Nvidia to sell certain models of its chips to China under an unusual arrangement in which the federal government took 15 percent, and later 25 percent, of the revenue from those sales. The arrangement made the administration a direct financial partner in Nvidia’s China business, and it is now one of the questions Congress wants answered: what the company received in exchange for its access, and what Washington knew about the risks.

The export-control question has already put the Commerce Department under pressure. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on CNBC on Friday that “Commerce has the pen,” meaning Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s department owns the export-control decisions, and Bessent questioned whether there had been a robust effort at Nvidia to ensure chips were not being passed through to China. Democrats have asked why Lutnick declined to blacklist companies suspected of smuggling advanced Nvidia chips to China, and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, a Republican, has asked both Huang and Lutnick to testify. House Republicans are demanding that Huang come in for a transcribed interview, threatening him with a subpoena if he refuses.

The board’s own response has been to separate the company from its founder as quickly as possible. Kress, the interim chief executive, is a longtime finance chief rather than a technologist, and analysts have noted that she is seen only as a caretaker for a company that needs technical leadership. The lack of any clear successor is itself an overhang on the shares, and the board has said it will consider both internal and external candidates. Among the names mentioned, Arm Holdings chief executive Rene Haas, who previously worked at Nvidia, has been named as a possible replacement, according to the Financial Times, while one of Nvidia’s own executives, the vice president and general manager of hyperscale and high-performance computing, has emerged as a leading internal candidate.

What Happens Next: Earnings and Congress

The first test for the new leadership comes on Tuesday, when Nvidia reports its fiscal third-quarter earnings, its first report without Huang. Interim chief executive Colette Kress will lead the earnings call for analysts, and investors will be watching closely whether the company’s financial performance can reassure Wall Street after weeks of steep declines. Analysts polled by FactSet expect Nvidia to earn an adjusted 2.47 dollars a share, up 90 percent year over year, on sales of 108.7 billion dollars, up 91 percent, in the fiscal quarter that ended October 25. A strong report could steady the stock; a weak one, or a cautious outlook from a new chief executive in her first days, could extend the slide.

The second test comes in Congress. Huang has agreed to testify before lawmakers, and he has been called to a closed-door congressional hearing on December 1, with lawmakers saying they will subpoena him if he does not voluntarily agree to appear. The questions will focus on whether his relationship with a suspected spy led to any transfer of intellectual property or advanced hardware to China, and on what the administration knew and when it knew it. A hearing has also been requested for December 3, where Lutnick is expected to face questions about the export-control decisions.

For the stock market today, the Nvidia story has become a test of how much of the artificial intelligence rally depended on a single person. Huang built Nvidia from a start-up into the world’s leading supplier of advanced AI chips, and his departure leaves a company with no obvious replacement at the top, a board running an independent investigation, and a Congress preparing to ask hard questions. The shares have already given back a third of their value since October, and the earnings report on Tuesday will show whether the business underneath the scandal is still growing as fast as Wall Street expects. What it will not show is whether the company can replace the founder who made it the centre of the AI boom, and that is the question investors will be asking for months.

Source: The New York Times